Caterina Barbieri 'Myuthafoo' LP

Caterina Barbieri is set to release the sister album of her 2019’s acclaimed Ecstatic Computation. Myuthafoo on light-years, followed by the Ecstatic Computation reissue with an extra new track.

Myuthafoo was written at the same time as Ecstatic Computation, which Barbieri regards as a sister album. Both albums are based on creative sequencing processes that playfully unravel Barbieri’s deep- rooted interest in time, space, memory and emotion. And since she was set to re-release Ecstatic Computation on her light-years imprint, it made sense to accompany that album with this intimately entangled set of unreleased recordings. Barbieri had been touring excessively at the time, and her process began to shift in response to that nomadic, interactive energy. Using the Orthogonal ER-101 modular sequencer, Barbieri manually programmed patterns into the device and fed them into her arsenal of noise generators, trialling different combinations at each show.

If an idea worked well in the live environment, she would put it aside, letting longer pieces breathe and transform as they sprung to life and developed organically. It’s a process she relates to her interest in cosmogony, the study of the universe’s origins; her music is rooted in the limitations of a small number of options that branch out into a much larger structure, eventually reaching towards an open-ended cosmos of possibility. From ‘Math of You’, it’s clear that the sounds are grounded in a similar sonic philosophy, blipping synth sequences nudge alongside each other harmonically, disrupting trance’s addicting euphoria with filigree polyrhythmic pulses. Like ‘Fantas’ before it, the track is focused around emotionally affecting repeating phrases, but a closer examination reveals hidden intricacies as these phrases flicker like illusions, dissolving and dissipating as they snake and weave.