Rafael Anton Irisarri

Midnight Colours is a haunting meditation on time, memory and existential fragility. Recorded in 2017 and released in its remastered form in 2024 on Black Knoll Editions, the album revisits a limited earlier version and expands its emotional and sonic reach.

From the opening track, The Clock, Irisarri sets a tone of quiet urgency. Drones swell, tape saturation bleeds into melodic blur, and the listener is drawn into an atmosphere that is both still and charged. The concept itself is ambitious, drawing on the imagery of the Doomsday Clock, humanity at two and a half minutes to midnight, and our collective anxiety about time running out.

Tracks like Falling Curtain, Oh Paris, We Are Fucked, and A Ruptured Tranquility shift between elegiac calm and overwhelming weight. The use of degraded tape machinery and analog artifacts gives the album a texture of fractured memory, not pristine ambient gloss, but something fractured and alive with tension. The sonics feel weathered, as though sound itself has aged.

Even in its darkest moments there is clarity. The album balances despair with a certain reflective beauty. It is less about resignation and more about facing the moment of liminality, the point when the hour is almost up, and one looks back, forward and inward simultaneously. The remastering for this edition brings heightened focus to the low end’s subterranean rumble and the upper layers’ fragile shimmer.

Ultimately, Midnight Colours stands as one of Irisarri’s most conceptually unified works. It links theme and sound, background and texture, urgency and stillness. For listeners who track his evolution from earlier works like The North Bend and A Fragile Geography, this album is a compelling chapter, not just another ambient drone record, but a statement on the fragility of time and human presence.