In a world where the surface has become a trope for glistering repetitions of self, pompous explosions of short-reeled extremes, digital debris and its ephemeral, disconnecting and intoxicating comfort, a form of distanced, attentive and (perhaps hauntological) listening can serve as an antidote to the madness of “being connected”.
Somewhere between Derrida’s, Deleuze’s and Fisher’s (post-)nostalgic ruminations lies the solace of silence and remoteness as a way of connecting and belonging. Rafael Anton Irissari’s Points of Inaccessibility is a line of flight towards this reconfiguration of reality and an exploration of the way the present is haunted by all the futures that never arrived.
The album’s core material was recorded as improvisations Irisarri did inside the former Pieter Baan Centre in Utrecht, a psychiatric prison and was later developed further at Irisarri’s Black Knoll studio in NY. Alongside Irisarri, Dutch visual artist Jaco Schilp was developing real-time, reactive, audio-driven point cloud projections, some of which adorn the album’s artwork.
The four pieces in the album present different slow-moving tones of this kind of listening beyond the surface, echoing the improvised and slow unraveling of sound through the building’s dark corridors and empty rooms. To Irisarri’s own words, while recording in Utrecht the sound carried traces of silence, as if the walls remembered things that had been forgotten. Each frequency hold[ed] a ghost. This atmosphere and emotional depth is minutely preserved in the album.
The opening piece “Faded Ghosts of Clouds” begins with Irisarri’s signature bowed guitar tones and gradually becomes a wall of clouds and repetitive echoes standing still between the past, the present and the future to come. There is an underlying sense of unresolved attunement that runs through all the four pieces and becomes more prominent in pieces like “Breaking the Unison” and “Memory Strands” that carry a sustained and contemplative depth that never peaks but constantly flows in repetition. “Signals from a Distant Afterglow” is perhaps the album’s most lyric moment. Featuring the angelic vocals of Australian vocalist Karen Vogt, the piece highlights the album’s recurring theme of unresolved repetition and echoing while bringing the listener closer, making a connection to a fleeting past/present, like rays of light cast on a darkened room, illuminating its obscured details for a short breath, before disappearing again.
Points of Inaccessibility builds upon and expand’s Irisarri’s sound while making it more refined, elaborate and empathetic to the challenges, realities and mysteries of human existence. Yet his work is not nostalgic or existential. Irisarri attempts to listen, feel, reflect, research, respond to and connect with the environments that inspire him while highlighting their underlying key qualities and linking them to universal themes that exist underneath the surface of human and more-than-human experience. As Irisarri writes: The record isn’t nostalgic. It’s about the way the present is haunted by all the futures that never arrived. We live inside systems that promise connection but deliver repetition. Everything loops, nothing resolves. (Maria Papadomanolaki)
a closer listen 