Rafael Anton Irisarri’s life has always carried the hum of elsewhere. Born in Puerto Rico, raised in the uneasy slipstream between San Juan and the mainland, he grew up with the kind of cultural dislocation that lingers in the bones long before it ever reaches the page. That split: geographic, emotional, historical, breathes inside his music. Every piece he makes feels shaped by an invisible pull across coastlines, memories, and the quiet hours where technology, silence, and longing hang together like unsettled air.
Known for collapsing ambient drift, experimental abrasion, and modern classical contour into a single language, Irisarri approaches composition as if all elements. – guitar resonance, remix fragments, bowed textures, manipulation, decay – were strands of one extended gesture. A restless collaborator, he arranges polyphony the way some people arrange light: through careful angles, through slow shifts, through gravity.
Now he offers a new opus: Points of Inaccessibility, arriving 6 February 2026 on BioVinyl through Black Knoll Editions. It began inside the stark corridors of the former Pieter Baan Centre in Utrecht, a psychiatric prison whose architecture pressed itself into the early recordings. Irisarri walked the building’s empty rooms with microphones, capturing bowed guitar drones and long-resonant harmonics that clung to the concrete surroundings. Dutch visual artist Jaco Schilp projected shifting point clouds during the sessions, though the album itself was ultimately reassembled by Irisarri alone in New York, the prison’s ghost acoustics folded into a new shape.
“Points of Inaccessibility came from thinking about how disconnection feels in an age obsessed with connection,” Irisarri explains. “We are constantly online, constantly visible, yet we drift further apart. The real distance isn’t geographic anymore, it’s emotional.”
He speaks just as plainly about the effect of the building: “Inside that old psychiatric prison in Utrecht, the air felt heavy with the residue of other lives. The sound carried traces of silence, as if the walls remembered things that had been forgotten.”
The resulting record steps through drone terrain, blurred harmonic drift, and stark quiet with a sense of pressure rather than spectacle. It continues Irisarri’s long-running study of memory and emotional distance—how rooms hold stories, how bodies hold unanswered questions, how dissolution and recollection cling to one another…bringing to mind the work of composers Caleb Burhans and Max Richter.
One of the album’s central instrumental pieces, Breaking the Unison, arrives from a place of personal heaviness. “I reached a point in my life where resignation started to feel like the only thing left,” Irisarri says. “That kind of heaviness gets sharper when so much of our connection happens through screens, where everything is visible but nothing feels grounded. You start carrying emotions that have nowhere to go. That is where this track began. Breaking the Unison carries that weight in its sound, with strings that strain upward and distorted guitars that feel like a pressure finally breaking through the surface.”
Listen to Breaking the Unison below and order Points of Inaccessibility here.
Long before this album, Irisarri shaped Seattle’s early-2000s electronic milieu, unveiling Glider under his alias The Sight Below; a release that pushed hazy guitars and submerged rhythmic logic into something that would define a new branch of ambient-techno. That instinct to move freely between drone, post-classical forms, and improvisational immediacy has carried through his entire career.
In 2010 he established Black Knoll Studio, and after relocating to the Hudson Valley in 2014, became one of the most trusted mastering engineers in independent music. His work spans Terry Riley, Ryuichi Sakamoto, William Basinski, MONO, Devendra Banhart, Grouper, Emeralds, Julianna Barwick, and countless others. Across labels and continents, his presence is a quiet anchor.
As a live performer, Irisarri prefers places built for reverberation rather than distraction: churches, factories, synagogues, planetariums, tunnels, abandoned hangars. These alternate sites sharpen the physical dimension of his work; spaces where stone, glass, steel, and air shape the listening body as much as the music itself. He often revitalizes overlooked or forgotten structures through sound, letting their histories breathe through resonance.
With Points of Inaccessibility, Irisarri turns again toward the distances we rarely name. The prison in Utrecht, the migrations of his childhood, the endless screen-mediated ache of the present—all of it swirls beneath the surface. This is music built from rooms that remember, from dislocation that never quite softens, from a life lived between points no map can fully chart.
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