Rafael Anton Irisarri

Two years have passed since Rafael Anton Irisarri’s last work, when with "FAÇADISMS" (2024) he completely dismantled the false propaganda of the so-called American Dream. His long-awaited return with "Points Of Inaccessibility" (2026) brings Irisarri back to imperious and nostalgic sounds, once again providing a lucid soundtrack for increasingly dark times.

Recorded in the Netherlands at Un Cloud studio, located inside the former Pieter Baan Centre—a forensic psychiatric prison where perpetrators of violent crimes were once confined—"Points Of Inaccessibility" confirms Rafael Anton Irisarri as one of the greatest innovators in ambient music of all time. Perhaps inspired by the desolate place hosting his recording studio, by the perception of the countless stories that have passed through it and still survive there like ghosts, Irisarri shapes his album with his most hauntological atmospheres, rediscovering ancient sounds embedded in memory, and drawing in particular from the sonic constructions of "A Fragile Geography" (recently reissued for its tenth anniversary).

Memory endures in a distorted guitar

Irisarri takes up the guitar, playing it with a bow and distorting its sound to create monumental pulses ("Faded Ghosts Of Clouds") that emerge after a slow build-up of loops which appear and disappear, becoming increasingly massive in his usual style of accumulating tension toward a final climax. As in his best works, the pathos here reaches remarkably high peaks. These spectral echoes make perceptible the idea of a sound rising from nothing, as if it had been absorbed by the surrounding environment only to re-emerge like the figure of a ghost. As Irisarri himself states: “Memory endures as residue and interference, continually shaping perception even when its source has vanished.”

Basinski reversed

The poles of inaccessibility, for Irisarri, verge on the now unbridgeable distance between human beings, kept apart by an entirely virtual world in which computing has created barriers more impenetrable than those once imposed by geography in the pre-digital era. "Breaking The Unison" marks this feeling of anger mixed with helplessness, serving as the melodic core of the entire album, while "Signals From A Distant Afterglow" is an apotheosis of loops and voice (the tragic singing of Karen Vogt): a piece that may seem Basinskian but is in fact its opposite, as it is non-linear. The loop does not decay into disappearance, it is not a creature that is born and dies: it is a circle endlessly repeating itself, transmitting tension and fragility.

This circularity, which also highlights closure and the failure of communication, clearly emerges in the thirteen minutes of "Memory Strands", enclosed, layered yet overflowing with Irisarri’s signature timbre, which is perhaps the saddest sound ambient music has ever produced.

19/03/2026