Menu

Caterina Barbieri

a4231551779_16

Caterina Barbieri, “Myuthafoo” (light-years, 2023)

,

This latest album from Barbieri is intended as a sister album to 2019’s landmark Ecstatic Computation and has been released to correspond with the imminent reissue of the latter. The central difference between the two albums is that Myuthafoo gradually and organically took shape during Barbieri’s extensive touring, as the “nomadic, interactive energy” of those many live dates inspired her to play with experimental variations in her process each night. More specifically, she would program patterns into her sequencer, then feed them into her “arsenal of noise generators” to explore different combinations and the most compelling results were set aside for future expansion and/or eventual release.

In characteristically cerebral fashion, Barbieri’s arcane processes have their roots in cosmogony, as she is fascinated with how a small number of limited options can “branch out into a much larger structure, eventually reaching towards an open-ended cosmos of possibility.” Admittedly, comparing Myuthafoo to the birth of a universe will probably establish unreasonably high expectations for some listeners, but they can at least console themselves with yet another killer Caterina Barbieri album while they patiently wait for a new and better universe to form.

The opening “Memory Leak” sadly lasts for only a single minute, but it crash lands onto the album in truly impressive fashion, as the undulating swirl of smearing, howling, and tormented sounds almost makes me forget that precision, patterns, and repetition have historically been at the heart of all of Barbieri’s work. Hopefully, she will someday explore that more feral and explosive side in more depth, as the rest of Myuthafoo is devoted to somewhat less radical variations upon traditional Barbieri fare. Far more representative is the album’s lead single, “Math of You,” which can only be described as “classic Barbieri”: an intricate web of moving parts centered around tense minor key arpeggios that increasingly become more slippery, tumbling, and streaking. While the term “cyberpunk” always makes me wince, it feels weirdly apt to describe “Math of You” as a cyberpunk twist upon burbling synth-driven kosmische, as Barbieri’s vision is similar yet significantly more tense, tight, muscular, and volatile (patterns subtly unravel and break apart throughout the piece). Interestingly, the similarly named “Myuthafoo” seems rooted in a similar melodic pattern, but takes a very different and more melancholy direction, as it is slowed down and dematerialized into tripped-out ghostly beauty.

“Alphabet of Light” opens the album’s second half in similarly subdued territory, as it resembles a viscous slow-motion deconstruction of an organ mass in which notes gradually start streaking outwards to leave pulsing vapor trails in their wake. The following “Sufyosowirl” then snaps back into tense, complexly rhythmic patterns for one of the album’s strongest pieces. In a general sense, it has all of the usual hallmarks of a classic Barbieri piece, but it also feels like a killer psychedelic upgrade for a whole host of reasons (though mostly because it resembles an intense and hallucinatory synth/marimba duet that culminates in a wild laser light show). The comparatively simple closer “Swirls of You” then ends the album with yet another gem, as it resembles the outro of a cool dreampop song expanded into warm, sensuously dissolving abstraction.

To my ears, there is not a weak piece in the bunch here (six songs, six hits) and some even feel like an significant creative leap forward for an artist who was already in a pretty enviable place to begin with. That said, whether a listener experiences Myuthafoo as a good album or a brilliant one is largely dependent upon how closely one listens, as Barbieri’s genius for detail is what sets her apart from just about every other synth visionary on earth (or as the album description more poetically puts it, “phrases flicker like illusions, dissolving and dissipating as they snake and weave” while “rubbery möbius strips…twist romantically”). Caterina Barbieri remains a goddamn magician.

Listen here.

a0860446015_16

Caterina Barbieri, “Spirit Exit” (light-years, 2022)

,

After a handful of teasing and divergent singles, Caterina Barbieri’s first full-length on her own light-years imprint is finally here. To be honest, I had some early apprehensions about how well Spirit Exit would stack up against previous releases, as this is an unusual Barbieri album for a couple of significant reasons. The most obvious one, of course, is that this is the first of the Milan-based synth visionary’s albums to feature vocal pieces. Equally significant is how the album was composed and recorded, however, as Barbieri’s previous releases gradually took shape from her eternally evolving live performances. Spirit Exit, on the other hand, is “100% studio music, written and recorded amidst Milan’s infamous, dramatic extremely strict two-month lockdown…at the very start of the pandemic in early 2020.” 

The drama and darkness of the period unquestionably surface a lot on these pieces, but the unraveling of civilization was but one of Barbieri’s major influences at the time, as Spirit Exit was also inspired by “female philosophers, mystics and poets spread across time…united in their strength at cultivating vast internal worlds.” Barbieri is no slouch at cultivating vast internal worlds herself, as evidenced by the “psycho-physical effects of pattern-based repetition” explored in her earlier work and the second half of the album features several pieces that feel like instant classics. Some of Barbieri’s attempts to expand her vision into more pop and dance-inspired places work a bit less well to my ears, which ultimately gives Spirit Exit a bit of a “transitional album” feel, but those pieces may someday dazzle me after being further honed by live performances or inspired collaborations (she previously managed to floor me once with Fantas and again with Fantas Variations, after all).

In classic “Fantas” fashion, Spirit Exit continues the fine Barbieri tradition of leading off her albums with an absolutely killer opener. In this case, the masterpiece is “At Your Gamut,” which resolves into something resembling beatless deconstructed house music after a brief snarl of sputtering, howling entropy. The heart of the piece is its bittersweet synth melody, however, which leaves psychotropic vapor trails and tendrils of arpeggios and countermelodies in its wake. Aside from being a great song, it is a perfect illustration of why Barbieri is on a plane all her own, as it is a fiendishly complex feast of interlocking melodies, shifting textures, and gleamingly futuristic, neon-lit beauty. 

Notably, “At Your Gamut” also inspired Barbieri’s first foray into sampling, as “it later gets crushed, accelerated and unrecognizably transformed into the ghostly hook” of yet another stellar piece (“Terminal Clock”). While earlier pieces on the album merely flirt with dance music, “Terminal Clock” is the piece in which Barbieri finally goes all in with absolutely sublime results, as swooning vocal fragments beautifully collide with a lurching kick drum thump, pulsing chords, melodic strings, and some wonderfully gnarled and tortured-sounding textures. To my ears, it is an instant stone-cold classic of outsider techno and an enticing glimpse of where Barbieri may be headed next. Remarkably, however, “Terminal Clock” is sandwiched between two other gems of similarly high caliber: “Life At Altitude” and “The Landscape Listens.”

“Life At Altitude” is something of a throwback to Barbieri’s earlier work, as it is essentially just a single killer arpeggio pattern enlivened with endlessly shifting textures and organically waxing and waning passages of intensity. Needless to say, it is spacey, psychedelic, and futuristic-sounding in all the right ways. “The Landscape Listens” is also quite spacey and hallucinatory, but it takes a very different path to get there, as bleary, hiss-soaked swells of melodies feel like they are straining to break through a bulging and tearing dimensional barrier. Despite that, it is an unexpectedly warm, tender, and meditative piece that culminates in a lovely swooping and swooning final act. 

For those keeping score at home, that means that four out of Spirit Exit’s eight songs are absolutely goddamn perfect and probably essential listening for anyone actively interested in the current cutting edge (or future) of electronic music. The remaining four pieces are a bit more of an inspired mixed bag, as they each miss the mark for me in one way or another, yet generally still have at least one extremely cool idea or theme at their heart. The best of the lot is the epic “Knot of Spirit (Synth Version),” in which a dreamy melody lazily falls through a backdrop of blurred and flickering stars like a comet before transforming into a more structured arpeggio workout for its second half. The remaining three pieces are all vocal ones whose only crime is that they tend to be a be bit too dramatic for my taste (likely influenced by the “end times” feel of the early months of the pandemic), but I can definitely foresee that side of Barbieri’s work reaching a much wider audience once she figures out how to better to play to her strengths, as her potential seems damn near limitless at this stage.

Listen here.

a0910258159_16

Caterina Barbieri, “Fantas Variations” (Editions Mego, 2021)

,

I was completely floored by the opening “Fantas” when I first heard 2019’s Ecstatic Computation, so I was thrilled to discover that it was unexpectedly getting its own well-deserved album of remixes. Given the brilliance of “Fantas” itself and the circle of talented and unusual artists surrounding Barbieri, I never had any doubt that I would enjoy Fantas Variations immensely, but I was still pleasantly surprised by the unexpected directions that some of these variations took, as the source material is damn near unrecognizable in some cases (especially in Evelyn Saylor’s startling opener). 

Naturally, much of the album’s draw for me lies in hearing what reliably great familiar names like Kara-lis Coverdale and Kali Malone could do with Barbieri’s intense synth opus and I was not disappointed in that regard. However, it is primarily the more unfamiliar artists (to me, at least) who steal the show, particularly on Bendik Giske’s haunting saxophone variation and Jay Mitta’s hyperkinetic snare freakout that resembles an unhinged, psychedelic Latin dance party or polka-themed nightmare.

Evelyn Saylor’s hazy and cooing a capella opener sets the bar quite high for bold and audacious interpretations of Barbieri’s work, as it almost sounds like it could be a lost vocal movement from Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, but with a more pronounced vocal jazz influence and some surprisingly intense wails near the end. Later on the album, however, Baseck turns up with the infinitely more bananas “Fantas Hardcore,” which sounds like it should be the soundtrack to sped-up footage of some first-person shooter video game or a supernaturally intense rave. Neither of those left-field surprises rank among my favorite pieces on the album, but they certainly illustrate how adventurous and wild some of Barbieri’s collaboration choices can be. 

On the more “safe” end of the spectrum, Walter Zanetti seamlessly transposes “Fantas” for guitar to approximate something akin to a mesmerizing Emeralds demo tape, while both Kali Malone and Kara-lis Coverdale beautifully adapt the piece to their own aesthetics (a breathy, slow-motion pipe organ reverie and a delicate, spidery solo piano performance, respectively). Carlo Maria, on the other hand, turns the piece into a driving bit of thumping synth-driven psychedelia that arguably recalls Emeralds again, but a considerably sexier and more dancefloor-driven incarnation of the band. 

As great as all of that can be, it is unquestionably Bendik Giske’s smoldering and serpentine “Fantas for Saxophone and Voice” that stands as the album’s most obvious and instantly gratifying masterpiece, though I am also greatly charmed by Jay Mitta’s half-brilliant/half-ridiculous vision of simply playing the original song, but adding some crazily over-the-top and relentless snare rolls to it. While I never expected Fantas Variations to eclipse Ecstatic Computation, I am nevertheless surprised at how well it succeeds as a weirder and more fun sister album.

Samples can be found here.

a4255192498_16

Caterina Barbieri, “Ecstatic Computation” (Editions Mego, 2019)

,

This Italian synth visionary made quite a spectacular impression with 2017’s Patterns of Consciousness and now makes her Editions Mego debut with its proper follow-up. To some degree, Barbieri picks up exactly where she left off, as Ecstatic Computation shares its predecessor’s masterfully executed conceptual conceit: using subtle shifts in obsessively repeating patterns to achieve a trancelike and hallucinatory effect. 

Given both that objective and Barbieri’s singular compositional rigor, Ecstatic Computation bears little resemblance at all to the work of other synth artists, but it also sounds quite different from the sprawling and sometimes overwhelming Patterns of Consciousness as well. While it is hard to pick a favorite between the two albums, this one is definitely the more accessible, as Barbieri has distilled her vision into a much more concise and focused presentation. This album is also quite a bit more varied and unpredictable, as Barbieri occasionally allows the machine-like precision of these pieces to careen off the rails and unleash a glorious and vivid shower of sparks.

Anyone in search of one single piece that perfectly captures all that is unique and wonderful about Barbieri’s vision would be well-served by heading straight for Ecstatic Computation‘s opening stunner “Fantas.” The piece begins by slowly billowing up through a static-ravaged fog streaked with howling, corroded snatches of melody, then coheres into a propulsively tight, dense, and pulsing arpeggio theme. It is an eerily beautifully and tense motif on a purely musical level, yet I am still more stuck by how sleek and futuristic it all sounds. Curiously, however, that central theme dissolves around the halfway point to reveal a disorientingly blurred and woozy interlude that sounds like out-of-phase tape loops of an organ mass. Initially, Barbieri’s choice to derail that impressive initial momentum seems like a quite a perplexing one, but the original theme slowly fades back into focus to ride out the piece’s final minutes…except that it is not quite as straightforward as that. 

Instead of fading away or just ending, the central theme is instead deconstructed, slowed, and stretched until it is destroyed in a visceral flurry of eruptions that feels like a dangerously close fireworks display. From start to finish, “Fantas” is a tour de force performance that vividly illustrates where Barbieri is at this stage of her career. Most other synth artists are content with coming up with a killer patch and shaping it into a composition—with Barbieri, that seems like it is merely the starting point. It is very easy to picture her room strewn with obsessive diagrams, notes, and drawings as she wrestles to find a way to transform each new piece into something mesmerizing and surprising rather than merely good.

Following the virtuosic latticework of that initial statement of intent, Barbieri allows herself to get a bit loose and experimental for next few pieces. While “Spine of Desire” is merely a brief and pleasant interlude, “Closest Approach to Your Orbit” is yet another intricate pattern of subtly shifting and transforming arpeggios. For the most part, it is a more understated work than “Fantas,” which enables the tumbling and occasionally squirming patterns to be a bit more hypnotic as there is no prominent melodic figure to steal the focus. There are some unusual dynamic and textural curveballs to be found as well, as the piece opens sounding vaguely like a marimba and closes sounding like a harpsichord, while everything in between is characteristically burbling and futuristic.

Aside from that, there is yet another climactic eruption of reverberating fireworks. The following “Arrows of Time,” on the other hand, is quite a radical detour, as Barbieri replaces her synth with a ghostly layered chorale of her own vocals over some sparse chords. It is quite a lovely piece and one that is far outside Barbieri’s usual approach, yet it still feels strange and haunting enough that it would not seem out of place in a space-themed Kubrick or Tarkovsky film. 

The album is rounded out by two final pieces that return to the rough template of “Fantas” with some ingenious and distinctive twists. The better of the two is the twinkling and majestic “Pinnacles of You,” which becomes increasingly frayed and disorienting as notes begin to sizzle and unpredictably lag and linger. The slower and simpler “Bow of Perception” is initially less impressive, but gradually becomes appealingly erratic and unstable as individual notes start to break free of their pattern to squeal and squirm. Also, the final moments sound like a vividly kinetic laser battle at an unhinged robot dance party.

I am hard-pressed to find any flaws at all with this album, as the only real caveat is that it unavoidably feels less substantial than its massive and wildly ambitious predecessor. That is fine by me, as I am just as happy with a short, filler-free, and oft-brilliant array of new pieces as I would be with another grand statement on par with Patterns. Every single piece on Ecstatic Computation is an inspired one, particularly “Fantas” and “Pinnacles of You.” I suppose that arguably makes this Barbieri’s “singles album,” but it is a remarkably thoughtful, coherent, and thematically consistent one. 

I am hard-pressed to think of any other artists that embody the balance of surgical exactitude and artistic vision as beautifully as Barbieri, as this album feels like the work of a hyper-intelligent android that has discovered human emotions and feels them quite intensely.While I am generally loathe to describe any artists’ work as “essential,” it seems reasonable to state that any collection of contemporary synth albums that does not include either this one or Patterns of Consciousness has quite a glaring hole in it. In the span of only a few years, Barbieri has established herself as one of the select few synthesizer artists who sets new standards and redefines what is possible with each new release. Ecstatic Computation is an excellent illustration of why she has earned that stature.

Samples can be found here.

a2529734426_16

Caterina Barbieri, “Born Again in the Voltage” (Important, 2018)

,

Last year’s Patterns of Consciousness was a massive, ambitious, and occasionally dazzling psychotropic opus that sought to reshape consciousness through pattern manipulation, instantly establishing Caterina Barbieri as one of the most compelling contemporary synthesizer composers. Naturally, it will be a damn tough act to follow, but Born Again in the Voltage is not its highly anticipated successor, as its four pieces were recorded back in 2014 and 2015. On this more drone-based affair composed for the Buchla 200, Barbieri is joined by cellist Antonello Mostacci for a more modest and understated batch of songs. As such, Voltage is not quite as striking or distinctive as Barbieri’s debut, but it is still quite good and “How to Decode an Illusion” is an absolutely gorgeous work.

The album opens with its most slow-building and minimal piece, “Human Developers,” which gradually takes shape around a core motif of distorted synth pulses with long decays. Soon after, Mostacci’s cello takes over the foreground and a wonderfully moaning, shivering, and whining swirl of strings coheres, yet Barbieri’s Buchla eventually makes a decidedly seismic resurgence. That is probably the most compelling part of the piece, as she whips up a shuddering earthquake of deep throbs that rumble up from the depths. That climax turns out to only be the piece’s halfway point though. The second half emerges from that crescendo as a twinkling, cosmic fantasia of rapidly rippling arpeggios, buzzing chords, and vibrantly chirping electronics. It kind of feels like I am in an electronic aviary that is simultaneously hallucinatory and a bit too busy and cacophonous to be entirely comfortable. I am not sure if that is an entirely good thing, but it is certainly a unique headspace to inhabit for a while.

The following “Rendering Intuitions” is considerably calmer, as it is built from a slowly churning bed of Mostacci’s moaning cello drones. Gradually, a glacial and elegiac chord progression coheres and the piece achieves a kind of lurching, melancholy beauty. It is hard to tell what (if anything) Barbieri is doing performance-wise, as synthesizers are conspicuously absent, but her hand definitely shows in the layering and processing of the intertwining cello themes. In a purely textural sense, I am actually fonder of the warm and organic cello sounds than those of the Buchla, but the next piece shows that the latter can open up an absolutely sublime world of rich emotional depth in the right hands.

“How to Decode an Illusion” is a legitimate stunner, as Barbieri balances a slowly burbling, buzzing, and throbbing melody with bittersweetly swooping bloops and a vivid, haunting undercurrent of buried feedback, crackling noise, and distorted afterimages. It feels a lot like a beautifully heartfelt requiem penned by an android, but the bubbling forward momentum and vibrant textural dynamics create a perfect blend of light and shadow that prevents it from ever becoming a slog through sadness. In fact, it could very well be the most wonderful piece that Barbieri has released to date.

After that triumph, the closing “We Access Only a Fraction” comes as quite a bizarre and candy-colored shock, resembling a relentlessly cheery, bubbling, and hyperkinetic synth pop freak-out. Or at least, it would sound like synth pop if it were not so maniacally busy and over-the-top. I truly do not know quite what to make of it, which I suppose is an achievement of sorts. In one sense, it is a bit annoying, but it is also transcendently bonkers, taking a mercilessly repeating simple theme and elevating it to over-caffeinated, tumbling lunacy. As a one-time experiment, its arpeggiated mayhem has some definite appeal, but a full album in that vein would be a borderline psychotic endeavor. I am relieved that Barbieri has thus far not opted to explore that direction further.

Aside from the questionable success of that final piece, however, Born Again in The Voltage is a strong and enjoyable album. Barbieri occasionally makes some unusual compositional choices, but they do seem like deliberate choices rather than flaws and the execution of her ideas is every bit as focused and vividly realized as her work on Patterns of Consciousness. The only real caveat with this release is that Barbieri’s overarching aesthetic vision feels like it was still in the formative stages, as each piece on Voltage seems to pull in a different direction. That said, it was an unexpected delight to hear a cello composition from her. Moreover, Barbieri’s talents as a composer were already quite formidable at this stage of her career, as “Illusion” is easily one of the best synth pieces that I have ever heard. While Patterns of Consciousness is unquestionably a more essential and visionary album than this one, Born Again in the Voltage is the more accessible and melodic of the pair. As such, it is a welcome addition to Barbieri’s discography, offering a more instantly gratifying entry point for new fans than her more challenging, sprawling, and consciousness-warping 2017 epic.

Listen here.

a3307774649_16

Caterina Barbieri, “Patterns of Consciousness” (Important, 2017)

,

Following a handful of elusive limited edition cassettes, Berlin-based composer Caterina Barbieri makes her formal debut in a big way with this massive and mesmerizing double LP epic. On one level, Patterns of Consciousness is quite possibly the epitome of Important Records’ long-standing obsession with pure synthesizer albums. On deeper level, however, this album is a unique and ambitious experiment that also happens to be synth-based, as it is structurally inspired by Barbieri’s interest in baroque lute music and conceptually inspired by a desire to trigger a fracture in consciousness through subtle shifts in hypnotically repeated patterns. Either way, it is quite an achievement.

This is actually Barbieri’s second full-length for Important (or for any label, for that matter), as she first surfaced in 2014 with Vertical on the label’s Cassauna imprint. ¬†Predictably, that album was similarly synth-centric (it was composed for a Buchla 200), but otherwise bears little resemblance to this latest salvo. All of the vocals, techno touches, drone elements, and grinding textures from that release earlier are gone and forgotten, which makes sense, as it seems like Barbieri was still finding her direction at that point. I think she has conclusively found it now, as Patterns seems much more like an inventive, coherent, and honest fusion of her far-reaching and esoteric aesthetic and conceptual interests. 

In fact, it would be an understatement to say that Barbieri has an interesting background for a modern synth composer, as she has studied classical guitar in Italy, extensively researched the history of Hindustani music, and written a thesis on “3D spatialization and the perception of time, space and sound spectrum in vertical music.” In the wrong hands, such a resume would undoubtedly translate into something rather bloodless and over-cerebral, but Barbieri proves to be quite adept at using her deep knowledge to take relatively accessible and vaguely Kosmiche music into more transcendent and psychotropic realms than usual. The closest stylistic antecedent for Patterns of Consciousness is prime/early Tangerine Dream, though Barbieri has clearly assimilated that influence in a rather curious and oblique way.

The area where Barbieri’s unique sensibility manifests itself most conspicuously is that of structure and sequencing. For example, each piece is composed of just a few simple intertwined patterns and nothing more, unrelentingly pulsing and burbling along from anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes with no significant new motifs or melodic shifts ever turning up to disrupt the entrancing spell. Also, on a larger scale, the album itself is structured rather bizarrely: each piece that has an actual name, such as the opening “This Causes Consciousness to Fracture,” is followed by a much slower piece with the same title presented as an acronym (“TCCTF,” for example). The two pieces seem paired in name only, unless any shared patterns are slowed to complete unrecognizability, yet they certainly seem designed to give the album a very unusual rhythm (the more complex and kinetic pieces are always followed by languorous and comparatively simple ones). 

That disorienting dynamic push/pull pattern is not broken until the final piece, the slow-moving coda of “Gravity That Binds.” Despite their significant differences, however, these seven pieces are thematically held together by a thread of strong, uncluttered melodies and enormous attention to small-scale dynamics. Given the understated nature of the album, Barbieri keeps the effects subtle, but her constant tweaks are more than enough to keep her themes sounding fresh: nothing is ever static and all of the various threads are constantly shifting in relation to one another and leaving a vapor trail of bleary after-images.

If Patterns of Consciousness has a fault, it is only that its mantric repetition, deceptive simplicity, and minimalist aesthetic do an unintentionally fine job of concealing Barbieri’s more radical intentions. Also, I am not sure that her foundational premise was actually successful in “unfolding new layers of perception” or unlocking unused psychic potential in me, though I doubt such changes would register all that dramatically in the conscious mind if they occur. 

The subject certainly interests me, but I have historically had much more of a noticeable psychoactive response to experiments with inaudible frequencies than I did with these shifting patterns. Still, it was a valiant effort that yielded an unusual album, so there is little to grumble about. More importantly, no one at all would care about the conceptual ambitions of this album if the actual music was not good (which it is), so any triggered hallucinations, revelations, or breakthroughs into a higher mental plane are just icing on the cake. 

In particular, I was most struck by some of the slower, later pieces on the album, such as “INTCAEB” and “SOTRS,” which resemble a sort of narcotic, sensuous, and bittersweetly melancholy twist on an organ mass. More significantly, Patterns of Consciousness as a whole feels like a major artistic statement through sheer obsessive repetition, slow-burning accumulation of power, and Barbieri’s singularly lute-influenced and arpeggio-heavy approach to modern synth composition. It is extremely damn hard to establish a distinctive voice wielding only a synthesizer, but Barbieri has succeeded admirably at it. No one else sounds like this.

Listen here.