Irarrázabal Together

By Dan Sorrells

Two recent releases showcase the versatility and physicality of Chilean double-bassist Amanda Irarrázabal as she improvises with very different partners.

Amanda Irarrázabal - Imprimiendo (Relative Pitch, 2026)

Imprimiendo is a series of "duets" in which one of the partners remains indifferent and unresponsive—or at least, doesn't respond in the manner you might expect. Amanda Irarrázabal plays her bass along with recordings of churning offset printers made at two printing houses in Santiago, Chile. Improvising along with workaday, nonhuman things calls to mind Günter Christmann and others playing with vacuum cleaners and coffee makers on albums like The Sublime and the Profane. In the liner notes to that release,Elke Schipper suggests that improvising with such sounds—the "profane acoustic environment"—is an act of sublimation. There's an ambiguity here I'm happy to leave unresolved. Are the profane sounds vaulted into the realm of art by being deemed worthy material with which to engage? Or, by "internalizing" these sounds as "emotional and imaginary substance," is it the artist's ability to find self-expression that's being elevated? Are these printing presses mere stimulus, or do they partake in the sublime when joined up with Irarrázabal?

There's a soothing familiarity to the structured sound of the printers: like a sheet of graph paper passing through the drums, it provides an orienting temporal grid. But this structure also marks out the comfortable zone from which Irarrázabal quickly departs. On "Panfletos" she enters tentatively, then assertively, syncopated and dancing around the hiss-click of the presses before moving into feathery bowed overtones. These harmonic explorations of friction and bass push through the obvious rhythmic nature of the presses and draw out the richness in their noise. Still, the printing presses are rhythm. It's interesting to hear the subdivisions buried within their repetitive work. These layers are especially apparent on tracks like "Illustraciones," and as Irarrázabal plays more fervently, the presses seem to respond, her rough texture and volume masking more subtle rhythmic elements while intensifying others. In turn, something about the regularity of the presses amplifies the momentum of her improvisations, like the feeling of speed conveyed by trees as they whip by a traveler's window. This phenomenon repeats itself again and again throughout listening to Imprimiendo : the illusion of change in unchanging elements, driven by Irarrázabal's impassioned performance.

It's not clear to what extent Irarrázabal may have arranged some of the field recordings into collages before entering the studio. Some dramatic interest is created by letting them fade in or out, reappear later, varying their volume. On "Copuchas, entrevistas y más," I had not registered that the hypnotic press had largely dropped out of audibility until it suddenly came roaring back, Irarrázabal drawing jaggedly across the strings. The album ends with Irarrázabal unaccompanied: "En blanco." With its pulsing dynamics and cadent bowing, it's anything but.

Phillip Greenlief & Amanda Irarrázabal - La Verdad Es La Verdad (Mother Brain Records, 2026) 

Moving from Imprimiendoto La Verdad Es La Verdad—duo recordings Irarrázabal made with Phillip Greenlief following a 2023 tour in Chile—it's hard not to think of the album that launched Relative Pitch 15 years ago: Greenlief's duo with Joëlle Léandre, That Overt Desire of Object . Here, as there, Greenlief plays at his usual supernatural caliber, mostly delivered with his breathily fluent tenor tone. He's one of the more remarkable and adept reedmen to come out of West Coast creative music (though nowadays, to my great delight and benefit, he's a fellow Mainer). And, like Léandre, Irarrázabal is a white-hot fusion of voice and arco mastery who obliterates any mistaking of body and sound, creator and creation, as being separate or separable.

Opener "Insomnia at the Zoo" is as restless as its title implies. If it doesn't quite come to crescendo, it arrives at a simmering catharsis, a valve releasing just enough pressure to keep the volatility at the pleasing edge of danger. When speaking about duets, it's easy to treat the music like a conversation, especially music with a strong contrapuntal give-and-take. There's a little of that kind of playing here on tracks like "Riverbeds" (what a metaphor: a broad contour guiding rivulets of water, but with paths not quite predictable). For me, Greenlief and Irarrázabal are doing something more like dance, an elemental synchrony of two bodies attending to their shared sense of movement. There's such focus and physicality in the music—just hear the energy being matched in dynamics and register and density throughout a piece like "Collapse"—that it's often nothing like the operation of reason or speech. Theirs is a bodily listening that goes past brain, straight into limb and throat and back out as sound. On the nocturnal "Later on with Constellations," clarinet and voice wend a rising and falling course together—all the way to an altissimo climax—Irarrázabal's bass a whispering countercurrent beneath. As I listen to their listening, I never hear either player deciding what they'll now "say" in response; instead, they work out the answer to "what's our next move?"

The track titled "Cave Paintings" reminded me of the famous prehistoric paintings in Lascaux. In "The Birth of Art," Blanchot wrote "yet by its nearness and all that renders it immediately readable to us," the work in the caves remains "mysterious as art but not an art of mystery nor of distance." This description transcends Lascaux and feels also like "the truth" of La Verdad: that for all the nearness of these gripping improvisations, for all that feels viscerally "readable" in them, there's a mystery at their center which isn't their end but is instead a ceaseless beginning, igniting our fascination—musician and listener alike.