#caterina barbieri

[womenofnoise]

Caterina Barbieri playing the wedding ceremony of Kali Malone and Stephen O'Malley (Sunn O)))), Wyoming, USA, July 2023.

[jgthirlwell]

09.19.24 Caterina Barbieri at Knockdown Center

[certainwoman]

Caterina Barbieri featured in Mixmag

ph: Leonardo Scotti

[grrlmusic]

Caterina Barbieri

[caviarsonoro]

No pasa el viento, cielo no hay que sienta.

Llueve lejana e indistintamente,

como una cosa cierta que nos mienta,

como un deseo grande que nos miente.

Llueve. Nada en mí siente…

Fernando Pessoa

[radiophd]

caterina barbieri -- math of you

[zef-zef]

Caterina Barbieri

source: arshake 📸: Maria Giovanna Sodero, Eleonora Mattozzi

[schismusic]

Caterina Barbieri, six years later

After taking my last exam on June 4th I was waiting for the train home to leave. As the carriage I was in decided all of a sudden to piss a good liter of accumulated rainwater out of the ceiling and the walls behind me, I grabbed my earphones to listen to some music — and all of a sudden I was reminded of Information Needed to Create an Entire Body and INTCAEB by Caterina Barbieri. I first found out about Caterina Barbieri about a year and a half after she released Patterns of Consciousness, or right around the time she was releasing her retrospective compilation Born Again in the Voltage. At the time Caterina was a guest at a local electronic music festival, and it was incredibly unexpected for me to find myself more attracted by the two most mundane names in the lineup: hers, just a first name and a last name, exhuding elegant confidence; the other, Ross from Friends, a practical joke that sounded more fitting for some kind of fifth-wave emo band than it did the blissfully nostalgic tech-house act it actually stands for. And while I did love Family Portrait, I actually never listened to it in full in one single sitting. Patterns of Consciousness, on the other hand, immediately became my jam.

As I delved deeper and deeper into Barbieri's ever-looping, never-ending melody-making, I would actually find myself scouring for any and all available information on her work. Not much was available at the time, and I only accidentally stumbled upon her website that also included what I would later find out to be PoC's vinyl liner notes. Basically every melody Barbieri works with is a slow and constant accumulation/substitution of notes played by one monophonic synthesizer, dialed into a sequencer and slapped back and forth through a number of stereo delay lines to simulate counterpoint and even polyphony. The system by which the notes gather together and sort of gravitate into their respective position is, by the artist's own definition, "algorithmic", almost stochastic: eliminating possibilities until a powerful form coalesces and emerges out of nothing. Impossible to find a better soundtrack for my early university days, the 7am walks to Algebra class. And of course Information Needed to Create an Entire Body was exactly the sound I heard when learning how to count the subsets of k elements from a pool of n objects, or learning how to calculate the n-th number in the Bell succession. Little did I know that this record I'd naively stumbled upon would last longer in my memory than any of the classes I was attending at the time (this is regrettable, to an extent, but it also stands as a testament to just how much of an earworm Barbieri's work is).

I saw Caterina Barbieri play live three times, one of which together with Carlo Maria as Punctum (the sole vinyl pressing of Remote Sensing is to this day, speaking not just as a record collector but also as an estimator of that particular album, one of my "white whales": a gaping hole that might very well never be filled). It almost could have been four. I ran into Caterina Barbieri outside the train station of my city, about to catch the train to go back home; starstruck, I approached her, shook her hand. I knew she was going to play that night, and kind of in passing mentioned I would have loved to attend, but hadn't had any luck with the tickets. She was kind enough to offer to put me on a guestlist, which kind of took me aback: I wasn't even aware that that could have been a possibility, and I was so grateful she would offer that. I really did not know how to react to that. Unfortunately, the place she was going to play is pretty hard to get into, so nothing came of it, but even just the gesture was enough to actually make me stop and think. 2018 and 2019 weren't at all good years for me, but looking back it's these small, lacerating moments of kindness that stand out to me: signals that not everything was lost, that I could still become a better person and get better.

When Ecstatic Computation came out in May 2019, I had been religiously waiting for it to drop and the very moment I finally listened to it I knew we had an AOTY contender. It was literally everything I was hoping a sequel to Patterns to Consciousness to be, as someone who wasn't that into Born Again in the Voltage: heavily based on a comparable compositional method, yet somehow more human, more emotional, more ecstatic like the record itself says. I spent hours on end listening to the closing track, Bow of Perception, over and over again; the opener, Fantas, struck every chord it needed to; it was quite interesting and refreshing to hear Barbieri belt out ethereal vocals on Arrows of Time; However, the one that's stayed with me the most throughout all this is track 2: an otherwise unassuming, one-and-a-half-minute vignette striking like lightning with a sore violent melody in some sort of odd time signature (never really counted it out). Spine of Desire injects an inexplicable sense of danger into the entire record, and it never quite leaves, never afraid of its own nakedness, drenched in reverb it provokes the listener out of the analog warmth and into some edgier territories not too far removed from the more Oversteps-esque tracks on Remote Sensing.

Now I'll be completely honest with you all: I wasn't a fan of Spirit Exit when it came out, and I haven't exactly revisited it lately, but I did go to see Caterina Barbieri perform live at the RoBOt festival in October 2022 (on that same night, Ben Frost's show was plagued by performance-crashing issues to the main clock of all of his machines, and he still owned the night, shaking everything in his path right down to the bone). I had some fun, actually. I've met her and seen her so many times I'm convinced she must be terrified of me being some kind of stalker, which I clearly am not — I just like her live shows a lot, and if I had to be a bit of an asshole, they're usually on the cheap side, which makes it easier for me to go see them. At any rate, I went and grabbed a vinyl copy of the then-new album, which is still sitting unplayed on my shelf: not the nicest thing, but oh well. Now on the other hand, I knew what I was waiting for.

Last summer, Barbieri released a record called Myuthafoo, which she refers to as "Ecstatic Computation's sister album". The reason I was so hyped to hear it is that track 2, "Math of You", premiered (played along Pinnacles of You) in Virgil Abloh's Imaginary TV initiative. I was so fucking hyped to hear some new Barbieri tracks at the time — late 2020, I think — and when that track hit I was immediately sold. Spent a whole day reloading the page over and over again just so I could relisten to that new song: ice-fucking-cold. Like Ecstatic Computation, but from a parallel universe that's still in the middle of an ice age (Resident Advisor's review of the full album that featured it very cleverly says it's more or less like Ecstatic Computation, but replacing the human pulse with something more mechanical and computerized — I am paraphrasing, of course, to keep more in line with the tone of this piece and my writing in general). I was hooked. The opening synth swirl became its own track, Memory Leak, and it's as hard-hitting an opener as anything in Barbieri's catalog. Its strength? It is unbearably short. It should last much longer, and yet it doesn't. Cry about it.

Then what: all of a sudden, on June 4th, 2024, I am standing near the exit door of the train home after my last exam, and I'm listening to these two tracks that in my head have been practically synonymous with fucking discrete mathematics and combinatorics, in what feels like another life yet at the same time all too close for comfort. And I still derive enjoyment from it, and it's still the exact same enjoyment, which to me is the craziest part. Sometimes we find small elements of our past selves, refracted into tangential information, fragmented and forlorn and yet crystallized exactly as they appeared at the time. This entire post is essentially a counterpoint to the OPN one: it's probably not only surprise that I'm looking for. It's also something deeper than that and at the same time much simpler.

In the summer of 2019 I had just gotten my driver's license. I got two friends of mine onto my mother's car and we drove to Fano to see Caterina Barbieri play live in a former church which had lost its ceiling during some 1943 bombings. I was hoping she would play Bow of Perception, but I knew — looking at her other live shows available on YouTube — she wasn't playing that track, and would usually start off with Fantas, move almost to the end of the record, then do an old one (usually Scratches on the Readable Surface). Whatever, anyway, I was still hoping, driving on a highway for the first time in my entire life, trying to remember all of the different bells and whistles you need to consider when you're just starting out behind the wheel. As I was sitting on the grass, now freely growing on what once was the inner floor of the church, I remember watching the opening act (an admittedly very talented guy by the moniker "Aspect Ratio", you can find him here (link Bandcamp)) remove his equipment from the stage and Caterina Barbieri taking position behind her machines. The tension was palpable, for some reason. And then that first staccato line hit me. All of a sudden I knew it was going to turn out okay, as hard as it had been. Six years later, that same old feeling of catharsis runs me over again.

[diviningiynx]

Bit of an update...

Some changes afoot. I started back at school this summer. This is something I was working on for my pen & ink drawing class. The assignment was to do a portrait. I'm studying music tech and illustration, so I decided to draw a musician I admire. Plus I hear she's playing a show in the area soon.

[grrl-beetle]

Caterina Barbieri - Myuthafoo

[musicmovesmarceline]

Listen to: Swirls of You by caterina barbieri

[womenofnoise]

Caterina Barbieri and Aphex Twin

[ruinedholograms]

Myuthafoo (2023)

[certainwoman]

FAVOURITE MUSIC RELEASES IN 2022

Caterina Barbieri - Spirit Exit

https://caterinabarbieri.bandcamp.com/album/spirit-exit

Marina Herlop - Pripyat

https://marinaherlop.bandcamp.com/album/pripyat

Elaine Howley - The Distance Between Heart And Mouth

touchsensitiverecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-distance-between-heart-and-mouth

Emile Mosseri & Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon

https://kaitlynaureliasmith.bandcamp.com/album/i-could-be-your-dog-i-could-be-your-moon

Whatever The Weather - Whatever the Weather

https://whateva.bandcamp.com/album/whatever-the-weather

Hekla - Xiuxiuejar

https://phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/xiuxiuejar

Claire Rousay & More Eaze - Never Stop Texting Me https://orangemilkrecords.bandcamp.com/album/never-stop-texting-me

Laila Sakini - Paloma

https://lailasakini.bandcamp.com/album/paloma

Ellen Arkbro & Johan Graden - I Get Along Without You Very Well

https://ellenarkbro.bandcamp.com/album/i-get-along-without-you-very-well

Natalie Beridze - Of Which One Knows https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/of-which-one-knows

Patricia Wolf - See-Through

https://patriciawolf.bandcamp.com/album/see-through

Carla dal Forno - Come Around

https://carladalforno.bandcamp.com/album/come-around-2

James K - Random Girl

https://jameskmusic.bandcamp.com/album/random-girl

Puce Mary - You Must Have Been Dreaming

https://puce-mary.bandcamp.com/album/you-must-have-been-dreaming

Puce Mary - STUCK

https://puce-mary.bandcamp.com/album/stuck

Bianca Scout & Elena Isolini - Our Hearts https://themthere.bandcamp.com/album/our-hearts

Ben Vida & Lea Bertucci - Murmurations https://leabertucci.bandcamp.com/album/murmurations

Hüma Utku - The Psychologist

https://humautku.bandcamp.com/album/the-psychologist

Rhoya - Red

https://unboned.bandcamp.com/album/red

Treasury of Puppies - Mitt stora nu https://discreetmusicgbg.bandcamp.com/album/treasury-of-puppies-mitt-stora-nu

[grrlmusic]

Mixmag

[knightofleo]

Caterina Barbieri | Myuthafoo