Review: The seeds of composer Rafael Anton Irisarri's latest LP were first planted during his 2016 tour in Italy, months before that Autumn's unexpected presidential election. The linguistic glitch of an innocuous diner in Milan named "il Mito Americano" - meant as "The American Dream" but translated literally to English as "The American Myth" - sparked a series of ideas, both conceptual and musical. Thus was Facadisms born, a mesospheric meditation on the world's many shared fictions and fantasies, essential and inessential. Listening to this ambient record is like standing naked on the outside terrace of a mountain aerie, blustery winds disturbing but not stopping our staring out over the miniature civilisations clustered below. With gnomic titles like 'A Little Grace Is Abundance' and 'Control Your Soul's Desire For Freedom', Irisarri compels the psyche to exward attention; his thickly packed, subliminal walls of ambience act as vessels through which to meditate on the injustices that puncture, and self-sever, the integrity of the American fundamental fantasy. Even going so far as to decry the concept of freedom itself (au contraire), Irisarri states in support of the record: "The impoverished peoples of the Americas have known all along that 'freedom' is a cruel illusion crafted by the elites, akin to Potemkin's fake villages designed to impress Catherine the Great," Irisarri indicates. "Facadisms illustrates a twisted inversion where the rulers deceive their subjects with illusions of safety, democracy, and free speech to create a grotesque mirage of control over their own lives."
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