Points of Inaccessibility Marks a New Phase for Rafael Anton Irisarri

Above Image Cred: Iulia Alexandra Magheru Rafael Anton Irisarri has been shaping long-form electronic work for decades, and his new album Points of Inaccessibility shows how far his process has moved since the early days of his career. The project started during a residency inside the former Pieter Baan Centre in Utrecht, which introduced a physical environment that influenced the earliest recordings. He tracked bowed guitar, layered tones, and slow harmonic movement inside rooms built for observation, then rebuilt the material later in his New York studio with precise processing and detailed treatment. The record examines the tension created when digital systems define the pace of attention, release cycles, and audience behavior. Irisarri set out to work at a tempo that rejects that pressure, producing an album that requires uninterrupted listening and long spans of focus. His approach relies on real-time looping, extended decay, and a guitar-driven process that expands the size of the signal without speeding it up. Points of Inaccessibility arrives in February 2026 with a run of European dates that highlight the scale of the project. Several shows will include live visuals by Dutch artist Jaco Schilp, whose point cloud system reacts to the sound in real time. Irisarri continues to work from his Hudson Valley studio, carrying forward the same long-term investigation into space, perception, and the influence of digital structures on modern listening. Interview With Rafael Anton Irisarri Photo by Jota Martinez How has your relationship with technology changed the way you make and release music? When I started almost thirty years ago, technology felt like a frontier. Digital tools were opening up new ways of working, experimenting, and breaking away from the old industry. Little by little, that sense of possibility collapsed, as the digital world became less about creating and more about managing yourself inside a system shaped by algorithms. Algorithms that reorganize how we listen, how attention moves, and how culture is fed back to us. My new album Points of Inaccessibility responds directly to that shift. It looks at what happens when technology stops being a tool and becomes the environment itself. Breaking the Unison, the first piece we are releasing, sits at the center of that idea. It deals with the moment when the individual and the system fall out of sync, when signals meant to connect us start scattering us instead. We all feel the distance between the promise of digital progress and the reality of algorithm-driven isolation. Platforms reward constant output, quick hits, and context-free fragments. Listening to an album like mine requires time, patience, and continuity, which are the very things the attention economy pushes aside. Technology is still central to how I make music, but I use it in a very specific way. Running my guitar through my looping system and building shifting layers in real time simply wasn’t possible when I started. I use those tools to expand the physicality of the sound, not to speed anything up. The album dictates the pace, not the platforms. As everything moves toward frictionless consumption, this record goes in the opposite direction. It insists on taking time, on listening without distraction. Photo by Jota Martinez Why did the former Pieter Baan Centre feel like the right place to start this project? I didn’t intend to make this album in a former psychiatric prison, it happened by chance actually. Dutch visual artist Jaco Schilp and I met in October 2024 at MUTEK in Mexico City. We crossed paths again a few weeks later during Le Guess Who? in Utrecht, where we talked for hours about perception and process, and he invited me to the Uncloud studio in the Spring. When I arrived for the residency in March 2025, I realized the studio was inside what used to be the Pieter Baan Centrum, a forensic psychiatric institution where people accused of severe violent crimes were evaluated. Walking through old cells and reinforced doors meant stepping into a space that had been built around observation and control. The atmosphere carried a heavy psychological weight. Being there as an artist rather than someone under evaluation created a tension that immediately shaped my awareness of the place. That environment changed the project completely. Jaco was building visuals from point cloud data that reacted in real time to whatever I played, so I had to perform nonstop for hours. The shifting black and white abstractions felt like psychological tests, somewhere between Rorschach patterns and the building’s ghostly residue. Being inside a building designed to probe human limits (the visuals, sound, space, etc) formed a closed loop. The echoes, blind corners, and uneven resonance forced a different kind of listening, one tied to physical tension rather than abstraction. That fitted naturally with the themes of Points of Inaccessibility: digital drift, algorithmic isolation, and trying to or