Orcas

Orcas\' murky and surprisingly emotive music isn\'t terribly removed from the minimalist ambience of The Sight Below, which is no surprise since half of Orcas is TSB’s Rafael Anton Irisarri. The other half is Benoît Pioulard (a.k.a. Thomas Meluch), with whom Irisarri has collaborated in the past. He\'s an artist also known for his ambient-washed atmospherics, though he works in more solid songforms. Meeting somewhere in the middle, their debut as Orcas bridges pop song structures (albeit fog-shrouded ones) and shadowy, electronic soundscapes with a delicate, precise touch that\'s utterly captivating. Songs like “Pallor Cedes” and “High Fences” use scratchy vinyl and static as backdrops for their slow and stately unfurling, with actual melodies and something like hooks embedded in the former while a hypnotic, barely discernable melody moves the latter. Pioulard’s gentle vocals and acoustic guitar bring an Iron & Wine sensibility to tunes like “Arrow Drawn,” and Irisarri’s hand is evident on dreamy, distant pieces like “Standard Error.” Their tribute to Broadcast’s late Trish Keenan is a moving, gorgeous cover of that band’s somber “Until Then.”

The courtship of ambient music and traditional songform has been a long and tenuous one, almost to the point that their differences seem irreconcilable. Spanning decades with only a few points of obscure intersections, the occasions on which the two styles have met and crossed into the pop culture lexicon have often yielded a contrary, oil-and-water form. The abstract nature of the “ambient” genre and instant gratification of the “pop” song require deft hands for successful cohabitation, thus it’s little wonder that there are so few practitioners of its delicate equilibrium. Orcas – comprised of haze-pop auteur Benoît Pioulard and post-minimalist composer Rafael Anton Irisarri – is an imaginative return to that narrative. Theirs is a style deeply rooted in personal variations on songform and ambient craft, and as a duo they bridge the furthest outlying aspects of their previous solo work published on Kranky, Touch, Miasmah, Room40, and Ghostly International. Here song and abstraction become one entity, condensing the spaces between to generate an arching trajectory. This co-mingling of contrasts is even coded into their moniker; Pioulard and Irisarri have chosen an iconic symbol of the American Pacific Northwest, a methodical sea hunter that is also a totem of the open oceans' expanse. The so-called “wolf of the seas” that evokes a quiet, stately, yet powerful nature. Appropriately, their music is a careful balance of chiaroscuro elements, where pop hook and spatial ambience converge. In its environs, lyricism flows as a time-distended dynamic, rising and falling, proceeding almost antithetically to pop's typical gratification ethos. Orcas has taken an immersive, fluid vector for their passions; a resonant call like sonar from the depths.

Electro-acoustic composers Thomas Meluch (aka Benoît Pioulard) and Rafael Anton Irisarri strike a balance between lyric-driven emotional appeals and aloof abstractions on this collection of nocturnal ambient pop.

Growing as it does out of a collaboration between two artists already known for their solo work, Benoit Pioulard and Rafael Anton Irisarri of the Sight Below, Orcas had certain expectations to live up to on its self-titled debut.

The prospect of Benoit Pioulard and Rafael Anton Irisam joining forces is an alluring one. Part pop auteur, part minimalist composer, the end result is undeniably beautiful.