This latest album from Rafael Anton Irisarri was partially inspired by an overheard malaprop in Italy years ago in which someone at a restaurant mistranslated The American Dream as “The American Myth.” That unintentionally damning phrase naturally resonated with Irisarri, who hails from Puerto Rico, and it came back to him in 2020 when he was researching brutalist architecture and Potemkin villages (a portable façade built to create the illusion of a real town). It is not terribly hard to see how Potemkin villages are a perfect readymade metaphor for the illusory promises of The American Dream, of course, but making an anticolonial power ambient album that channels that revelation in an interesting and unique way is quite a bit harder. Irisarri ingeniously solved that problem by mirroring the “cyclical nature of our tumultuous political history” with roiling storms of distortion and hiss, which he envisions as a series of tempests and receding tides that leave behind only “dust, delusion, and memory.” Some pieces admittedly pull off that trick better than others, but the best moments beautifully evoke something akin to a glimpses of a flickering mirage through a raging sandstorm.
The opening “Broken Intensification” provides a fairly representative introduction to Irisarri’s FAÇADISMS vision, as it rolls in as a steadily intensifying roar of bass rumble and hazy guitar noise that feels like it is fading in and out of focus. I imagine it sounds a lot like listening to an ambient album from the window seat of an ascending rocket, as the extreme volume of the fiery liftoff would unavoidably overpower every other sound. The piece does not evolve much beyond that, which I initially found frustrating, as there is no shortage of greyscale ambient albums in the world and they are generally not my favorite thing. That said, that aesthetic makes perfect sense thematically, as the American empire is itself an all-consuming destructive roar that is ultimately hollow, so I guess Irisarri nailed that bit rather admirably. Once I grasped that, the album made a lot more sense to me, as I stopped looking for moments of submerged beauty and started focusing on the obliterating elemental power of Irisarri’s noise storms and it definitely seems like that is where he focused most of his attention. Consequently, the ideal way to experience this album is to crank it up loud or throw on some headphones and feel the full visceral power of Irisarri’s seething hurricanes of hiss and distortion.
That is not the only attraction, however: the storms may be the album’s most defining and recurring theme, but there are also pieces where the maelstrom is subdued or fitful enough to reveal a bit of what is happening underneath. Sometimes it feels like glimpsing some flowers defiantly growing in a scorched wasteland, while other times it can resemble a badly damaged, blown-out tape of church hymns or a bruised sunrise slowly burning through a thick fog.
Notably, most of the strongest pieces fall on the second half of the album, as the album’s arc seems to trend towards decreasing levels of obliteration. My favorite piece is currently “The Only Things that Belong to Us are Memories,” as Irisarri’s warm chords actually break through to the surface and mostly stay there (albeit in frayed and dissolving form), but the following “Forever Ago is Now” is a similarly fine piece that escapes even further from noise squalls to achieve a sort of cinematic majesty.
There are also a handful of compelling passages that depart more conspicuously from the hiss-ravaged drones and engulfing roars that dominate the album and they evoke everything from a meditative walk through the forest with a distant towering forest fire as a backdrop, Popul Vuh’s Aguirre theme if it was repurposed to fit a blackened volcanic hellscape, or a disturbingly apocalyptic planetarium soundtrack. That said, my one big caveat is that FAÇADISMS would not be the place I would start if I was new to Irisarri's work, as this is more of a challenging listen than more melodic releases like Peripeteia and The Shameless Years. Fans of bleary textures, brutalist ambient, veils of noise, and painterly use of hiss and murk will find a lot to immerse themselves in, however.
