From a distant balcony of time, we listen for signals and learn how rarely they arrive intact. Signals from a Distant Afterglow, from the upcoming album Points of Inaccessibility, reaches us the way ancient starlight reaches Earth – delayed by vast intervals, thinned by passage, altered by every medium it crosses. Rafael Anton Irisarri treats sound as astronomy treats light: as evidence rather than presence, as proof that something once burned, expanded, and sent its trace outward. What we hear is a transmission that has endured distance, loss, and distortion simply by existence.
The piece began its life inside the former Pieter Baan Centre in Utrecht, a structure built for containment and quiet. In such a place, silence carries mass. Bowed guitar tones accumulate with patience, stretching through corridors and sealed rooms, settling slowly as if obeying an unseen force. Each sustained note widens the sense of duration. Time elongates. Space listens.
Alongside this process, Dutch visual artist Jaco Schilp developed real-time point-cloud projections, driven by a continuous flow of audio data. Sound and image evolved together, responding as shifting fields of signal and interference. Forms appeared, dissolved, and reassembled, never fixed long enough to be possessed. Perception became provisional.
The material later moved to Irisarri’s New York studio, where reduction became an act of care. Vast improvisations were narrowed to essential coordinates. Selected passages were translated into MIDI, allowing restrained harmonic extensions to surface through Prophet-5 tones, Moog bass, and finely weighted strings. Editorial guidance from Abul Mogard clarified pacing and proportion, reinforcing a condition of suspended motion—forward movement without destination.
Karen Vogt’s voice enters as a distant transmission rather than an address. It travels through layers of delay and dispersion, softened by the medium that carries it. Meaning arrives incomplete, its contours blurred. The voice functions as evidence: a broadcast received late, altered by distance, yet unmistakably alive.
At the centre of Signals from a Distant Afterglow lies a meditation on persistence. Signals continue even after their sources recede. What remains is residue rather than clarity, an afterimage rather than contact. In this music, connection survives as trace, a faint but faithful record that something once reached outward, crossed immeasurable space, and was received.
Points of Inaccessibility will be released on February 6, 2026 via Black Knoll Editions on BioVinyl and will be accompanied by audiovisual performances across Europe. Listen to Signals From A Distant Afterglow below and order the single here.
Points of Inaccessibility by Rafael Anton IrisarriCatch Rafael Anton Irisarri on tour as he makes his way through Europe, making stops in Hungary, Austria, Spain, Greece, the UK, and Germany.
Tour dates
23 January 2026 — House of Music Hungary, Budapest
24 January 2026 — Strum + Iodine, Vienna
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*
6 – 8 May 2026 — TBA, Berlin*
14 May 2026 — Dabadaba, San Sebastian-Donostia
*w/Abul Mogard
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