On the train back from London earlier today my boss was gazing out the window as we left a station of whose name I can’t recall, out at the flurry of high-rise apartment blocks springing up everywhere. She said “people really need to stop having children don’t they?”. It was just an off-the-cuff remark, and we chatted about birth-rates and the housing market and the usual stuff for a little bit before moving on, but I found the spontaneity of the remark earnest and sad. The grim reality of human industrial outreach is right in front of us every day, yet all that can seemingly be mustered is a quiet statement of fact and a brief discussion on the futility of the situation.

“Solastalgia” is one of those recent literary inventions that probably should have had an expression in English long ago, like “sonder”. It specifically relates to the feeling of pain or sadness experienced in the face of a changing world, destruction of the environment both natural and also distinctly human in origin in or near their homes. It’s the despair felt by tribespeople of the Amazon or the inhabitants of Montserrat, those who have a homesickness that cannot be rectified and continue to live in sight of the pain. Perhaps even, dare I say it, of the average city dweller. Do we not subconsciously crave green spaces and open skies, are we not more amenable in the sight of trees than the concrete jungle?

What Irisarri touches upon here is a fear, one that spans the past and the future both, a fear that we are losing something unspeakably valuable at the price of human expansion. We can see and feel this loss around us all the time as the average person slips further and further from our genetic predilections. Opener “Decay Waves” crystallises that sentiment right away on haunting, darkling shores as enveloping melancholia advances in circular patterns of tidal drone energy, a slow-motion rip-current of obvious catastrophe probing deeper into our embayments. We stand at its cusp, helpless and useless and silent.

Hope feels scant, the possibility of salvation wearing and difficult. What once was lies hidden just beneath the surface, tantalising reminders of historic home. “Visible Through The Shroud” leans with the same idiosyncratic obliterations of “Coastal Trapped Disturbance”, re-revealing some ethereal sense of place the way a drought uncovers archaeological sites seen in suggestive forms in aerial photos. Sketches of past presents are baked into its smothering tones, an uneasy veil of unknown musical origin permeating the air like some kind of Gaiac ghost rising out of the disfigured land.

Worst of all is the insidious creep of it all, the deceptively slow erasure of all things good and natural. Closing “Black Pitch” dips vertiginously from slow and unformed masses into accelerating and irreversible surging and wavering RAI classicism, the slow figure of the droplet of change defining itself before breaking off in tarry slow motion. It resonates a climatic tipping point of which there cannot be any return, an irreversible action dumping a leaden past into a broken and unwholesome future.

How long will it be, perhaps, before the only emotion that remains in the human repertoire is solastalgia?