This mesmerizing opus from NYC-based composer Irisarri first began its life with a chance meeting at MUTEK in Mexico City, as a conversation with Dutch media artist Jaco Schilp regarding how technology shapes perception led to an invitation to a collaborative residency at Uncloud (located in a former psychiatric prison in Utrecht). Appropriately, that original topic relates closely to the album’s overarching concept, as Points of Inaccessibility reflects the pervasive isolation and alienation that has resulted from living illusory digital lives (“we inhabit spaces saturated with signals, yet the possibility of genuine contact becomes increasingly remote”). Schilp’s visual research also played a significant role in the album’s shape, as Irisarri’s sounds were processed through “custom point-cloud software patch that produced images in continuous flux” in which “visuals flickered, dissolved and reformed like memories that resist coherence, functioning as a digital Rorschach that reflected the observer’s own perception.” The music achieves a very similar end, as warm and beautiful forms endlessly blossom and dissolve in a roiling ocean of static.
Notably, Schilp’s own process required “a continuous stream of sound in real time,” so Irisarri’s initial recordings at Uncloud were mostly of bowed guitar drones processed through various pedals and looping systems. Admittedly, that approach sounds like business-as-usual for Irisarri, but the album continued to evolve further once he returned to his home studio, as he fleshed out the original recordings with synth, Moog bass, and strings while remaining as faithful as possible to the original performances.
That seems to have been a remarkably effective (if convoluted) working method, as the core of the album was “created under conditions of immediacy and constraint,” but it evolved into a “fully realized work through careful revision, patience and sustained reworking” that focused primarily upon “expanding the harmonic field.” During that reworking process, Irisarri also tagged in a couple of talented friends, as Abul Mogard is credited with editorial input and “strategies (against conformity),” while Parisian vocal artist Karen Vogt turns up to warm “Signals from a Distant Afterglow.”
To my ears, the opening “Faded Ghosts of Clouds” is probably the single greatest piece that Irisarri has ever recorded, as it feels like a slow-motion deconstruction of a gorgeous cello sonata that gradually bursts into flames and dissolves into pure light. Listening to it, I feel like I am on the bridge of a disabled spacecraft that is drifting towards a collision course with the sun and that I am spending my final moments bathed in the purifying light of something immense and celestial as eruptions of solar flares viscerally tear through the protective metal hull around me. Impending ego death never felt so good.
While the remaining three pieces all feel like variations upon a very similar theme (slowed-down string pieces ravaged and consumed by intensifying distortion), they each feature a cool and distinctive twist of their own and any of them would have easily been an album highlight on any earlier Irisarri release. In the darker, more brooding “Breaking the Unison,” for example, there is a slippery, endlessly shifting undercurrent of oscillations that unpredictably speed up and slow down, while “Signals from a Distant Afterglow” features an achingly beautiful chord progression that blossoms into tendrils of synth melodies and vocal loops. While such billowing ambient bliss is hardly radical new territory, Irisarri’s incredible attention to details like textures and harmonies elevate that vision into something much greater, as every single note feels like it is actively fraying, smoldering, or dissolving and the fleeting sounds of crashing waves and seagulls give it a strong (and enchanted) sense of place.
The closing “Memory Strands” achieves a similarly impressive feat of textural sorcery, as slow-motion chord swells slowly gradually emerge from a sea of crackle and hiss to approximate footage of a sunrise slowly burning through a deep fog. It arguably borrows a page from Will Long’s Celer project, as a single motif endlessly loops into infinity, but the magic lies again in the details, as that hypothetical sunrise feels like it was captured on a reel of dark and grainy film that beautifully intensifies the mystery and textural complexity of the streaking colors. In short, Points of Inaccessibility is essentially four great pieces in a row and quite possibly Irisarri’s zenith, as he was truly firing on all cylinders here: simple, beautiful melodies; gorgeously warm harmonies; and plenty of roiling, hissing, burning, and ravaged textures.
