- The Italian synth artist adds cello and voice to her spellbinding compositions.
- A single instrument can change an artist's approach entirely. For Caterina Barbieri, a classically trained musician, it was the Buchla 200 modular synth, which has become a central element in her minimalist electronic experiments. We were introduced to her shamanic mastery of synths on her debut album, last year's Patterns Of Consciousness. On her second full-length, Born Again In The Voltage, cello and vocals are thrown into the mix. These additions could be jarring, but Barbieri blends them together as though they're just another signal emerging from her synth. In a recent interview with FACT, she gestures at this idea, referring to "undressing" a sound's cultural references and "emphasising its spectral, physical qualities."
On the opening track, "Human Developers," the long, declarative drones meld into signals that sound like walls of distorted guitar noise coupled with wavering cello. Halfway through, ecstatic wails appear out of a quietened backdrop, and a spectrum of scintillating sounds emerge as the song comes to a close. It's as if the soundwaves are taking form in the sky—some travel across like shooting stars, others root themselves into the arrangement like constellations. While naming tracks might be an afterthought to some, Barbieri treats them like a conceptual necessity. Take "We Access Only A Fraction," which seems to transpose a map of someone's neural network into music. Vocal sighs dissolve into whirrs, resonating like just another layer of Buchla noise, whose signals are rendered into rapidly firing neurons communicating with each other.
The other two tracks, "Rendering Intuitions" and "How To Decode An Illusion," also evoke concepts of human biology and outer space. Both convey a distinctly melancholic bliss. "Rendering Intuitions" gets there with overlapping cello drones. On "How To Decode An Illusion," Barbieri shapes vocal tones into a chorus that sounds as though it's singing through silky layers. With Born Again In The Voltage, Barbieri goes deeper into undressing familiar timbres, this time with human voice and string instruments. With them, she's able to guide us on an introspective trek through the expanse of our own brains and the cosmos alike.
Tracklist01. Human Developers
02. Rendering Intuitions
03. How To Decode An Illusion
04. We Access Only A Fraction