A replacement for Colleen has been found for Soundscapes II, joining Pan American and Ben Frost in St Katherine's Church at 20:00. It is Rafael Anton Irisarri:

"Rafael Anton Irisarri's music is a dual perspective close-up focus on the micro textures of rustling static-filled sonic surfaces with the wide-open distant tree lined horizons of sunset at dusk. Submerged piano melodies, reverberating guitar tonalities and electronic punctuation all contribute as the converging elements, but it's his hand at electro-acoustic composition that offers the listener the often breathtaking vantage into this sonic world. The combined effect is one of time passing in introspection, remembrances of landscapes and the nature of our relationship with things past as we move toward those yet to come. Plaintively yearning, his music never resigns itself to the stoicism of the melancholic, but is asking, moving, and drawing us into a state of hearing, seeing and recognizing the scale, scope and richness of the natural world and ourselves in the everyday.

This music draws as much on modern genre progenitors like Brian Eno, Robin Guthrie and My Bloody Valentine as it does from the more historic traditions in neo-classicism from Erik Satie and Olivier Messiaen. It's this intersection of sounds, both traditional and modernly avant, that make for the balancing act that can be described as something beyond just 'ambient' or 'cinematic' in his music; it brings the listener to a state somewhere between emotionally entranced and psychologically adrift.

No wonder his Miasmah label release is titled "Daydreaming" - as that's exactly where we find ourselves experiencing his music as the listener: caught in the shifting states between self-awareness and disembodied observation with an emotional impact not unlike that most unexpected of epilogues.

Words by Jefferson Petrey, Seattle (2008)"