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

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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.

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

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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.