Rafael Anton Irisarri is an Ibero-American composer and producer working within ambient, drone, modern classical, and electronic music. Born in Puerto Rico and raised between San Juan and the United States mainland, Irisarri grew up moving through cultural and geographic displacements that instilled a lasting preoccupation with memory, distance, and the emotional weight of place. This perspective, informed by the physical presence of landscape, weather, and movement in daily life, underpins an aesthetic defined by harmonic density, measured pacing, and a clear sense of locality as a spatial and emotional force.

Irisarri approaches composition, performance, and studio practice as parts of one continuous process. He works with a vocabulary guided by the tonal shifts that alter focus and perception. Using electronic, acoustic, and recorded sources, he builds structures that unfold gradually through resonance and duration. These principles carry across his recordings, live performances, and sustained studio work.

His music first gained wider recognition through Seattle’s electronic community in the 00s with two full-length albums released as The Sight Below on Ghostly International. The project introduced a distinctive language of blurred guitar, submerged rhythm, and meticulously arranged textures, forming the basis of a practice that moves between drone, modern classical writing, and electronic forms. It also reinforced the link between his studio ethos and live performances, both built around a detail-driven approach to sound.

In 2010, Irisarri founded Black Knoll in the Pacific Northwest. After relocating to New York’s Hudson Valley in 2014, he developed it into a studio known for its collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Terry Riley, William Basinski, Grouper, Julianna Barwick, MONO, Emeralds, and Devendra Banhart. He takes on projects selectively, choosing work that aligns with his own aesthetic. His engineering credits reflect a disciplined attention to clarity, technical nuance, and sonic coherence, qualities that have shaped well over a thousand recordings throughout his career.

Over the past two decades, Irisarri has developed a catalog grounded in a compositional language that pairs fragility with tension. He works primarily with electric guitar, extending it through bowed techniques and layered processing, alongside a wider family of strings, synths, piano, and voice. Ostinato figures appear throughout his music, functioning as patterns that mirror the repetitions and returns that define much of lived experience. His music stands apart from the instant gratification and dopamine-driven impulses of the attention economy, creating a slow-building narrative driven by subtle variations in timbre that gather towards a cohesive whole. Irisarri’s work has been covered by BBC, The Wire, The Quietus, Pitchfork, Resident Advisor, MOJO, Uncut, Interview Magazine, Electronic Sound, NPR, SPIN, and Gonzo (circus).

His live concerts take place in acoustically distinctive environments such as churches, museums, synagogues, planetariums, and industrial spaces. The character of each room is an integral element during his sets. Each setting contributes directly to the music, responding to the architecture and its acoustic characteristics in real time to highlight the physicality of sound. Irisarri has performed at major festivals and cultural institutions across Europe, North America, and Australia.