Rafael Anton Irisarri
Midnight Colours

After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch and physicist Hyman Goldsmith gathered around them prominent figures in the field of physics, particularly former physicists from the Manhattan Project (among them Julius Robert Oppenheimer but also - among others - Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell) and initiated the "Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists" project: a magazine of informative nature on the dangers related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In 1947, the "Doomsday Clock" was inaugurated, which symbolically counts the minutes to midnight (i.e., the end of the world) and since 2007 has expanded its "range" to include the threat of other catastrophic events like climate change. From the outset, J.R. Oppenheimer himself emphasized how the project had only relative reliability, however, if today for the first time since 1953 (the year of the H-bomb) this clock shows only two minutes to midnight, then evidently things aren’t going so well.

This state of crisis, due to the rise of nationalism, aggressive foreign policy attitudes, and the nuclear armament of the USA and Russia, along with the lack of agreements on climate change, have influenced the content of Rafael Anton Irisarri's new musical work. One of the major multi-instrumentalists, composers, and contemporary American producers, Irisarri lives in the state of New York, but he can be considered a citizen of the world for his music’s propensity to break every frontier both in terms of experimentation and regarding its conceptual orientation, inspired by a 360-degree view of the world around him. It’s on these bases that the album "Midnight Colours" (Geographic North) was conceived and defined as the soundtrack of the "Doomsday Clock," a work with inevitably dramatic character and tones that convey more than fear instead a deep melancholy: that regret you might feel as you disenchantedly witness the end of the world and when it is already too late to turn back.

Conceptually akin to the content of "The Machine" by John Foxx and The Maths, the compositions (eight in total) of the album resume that typical "pointillist" character that has become the trademark of this composer rightly defined as post-minimalist, and here he recorded the album entirely on tape using an old Otari, almost as if to imprint these intense sensations on a film strip, which by the way also have a certain cinematic and derivative aspect from classic science fiction whose central themes today are even further from being resolved compared to the past.