Rafael Anton Irisarri :: Points of Inaccessibility (Black Knoll Editions)

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Points of Inaccessibility merges Rafael Anton Irisarri’s immersive sonic improvisations with Jaco Schilp’s dissolving point-cloud imagery to create a haunting meditation on distance, memory, and perception. Born within the charged confines of a former psychiatric prison, the work feels suspended between presence and disappearance, its fragile architectures shaped as much by place as by the ghosts of its own unfolding.

Mapping the architecture of absence

Points of Inaccessibility (LinkTree), the striking collaboration between Rafael Anton Irisarri and Dutch media artist Jaco Schilp, unfolds as a meditation on distance, memory, and the fragile architectures of perception. Born from a 2025 residency at Uncloud in Utrecht, the project carries the weight of its environment. The Uncloud studio sat within the former Pieter Baan Centre, a psychiatric prison whose charged atmosphere permeates the album. Its quiet corridors and echoes of confinement seep into every gesture, shaping a work that feels suspended between presence and disappearance.

Irisarri generated long bowed guitar tones that drifted through layers of effect pedals, loops, and time. These sounds provided the material that Schilp fed into his custom point cloud software, where shapes flickered and dissolved in response to shifting frequencies. The process formed a feedback loop between sound and image. Each fragment behaved like a digital memory, unstable and shifting, revealing as much about the observer as about the source. What emerged from these exchanges was not simply an audiovisual experiment but a reflection on how the past lingers as both signal and noise.

The residency demanded constant improvisation. Irisarri produced hours of uninterrupted sound so Schilp could sculpt visuals in real time. Nearly three hours of material returned with him to New York, where he shaped the improvisations into coherent pathways. Synth bass and strings deepened the emotional field, while Abul Mogard helped shape the narrative flow. The compositions retain the spontaneity of their origins while gaining a sense of sculpted inevitability.

Across four movements, the album charts a journey through states of partial visibility. “Faded Ghosts of Clouds” opens with drifting textures that refuse to settle. “Breaking the Unison” splinters into divergent paths that mirror the fractures of contemporary life. “Signals from a Distant Afterglow,” featuring vocals by Karen Vogt, feels like a message decoded from another realm, luminous but unstable. “Memory Strands” closes the cycle with delicate motifs that unravel into quiet, leaving only traces behind.

The thematic core of the collaboration lies in the idea of inaccessibility: remote poles defined by their distance from everything else. Irisarri and Schilp treat this concept as a metaphor for life within digital enclosures, where connection is simulated yet rarely felt. Their work becomes a soundtrack for a world saturated with signals but bereft of true communion.

The cover artwork by Daniel Castrejón, built from Schilp’s visuals, extends this tension. The image resembles a frozen apparition, textured and enigmatic, echoing the bodily surfaces in the paintings of Antoni Tàpies.

Points of Inaccessibility stands as a vivid and unsettling document of our moment. It offers no easy resolution, only an invitation to listen closely to the spaces between us and to the quiet distances that define our age.

Tour dates ::
23 January 2026, House of Music Hungary, Budapest
1 February 2026, LABA, Iruña-Pamplona
6 February 2026, St Paul’s Sessions, Amphitheater of the Athens Conservatoire
14 February 2026, Casa Montjuïc, Barcelona
4 May 2026, Dig That Treasure Festival, London

Mastered by Stephan Mathieu
Artwork by Jaco Schilp
Design and layout by Daniel Castrejón
Artist photo by Iulia Alexandra Magheru