For less than ten years, Italian composer Caterina Barbieri has been the creator of a singular electronic music, charged with life, energy and great spiritual power. Light-Years, the label she has just set up, is releasing her new album Myuthafoo (2023), accompanied by the reissue of the earlier, equally successful Ecstatic Computation (2019).

At last year's Closer Music festival, Caterina Barbieri played to a full house at one of her rare Paris concerts. On a stage decorated with an iridescent plasticized drapery, she appeared alone, body frozen and face pale, shoulder and right arm covered in a kind of cyborg armor, which seemed to extend the machinery of her modular synthesizer. With measured gestures, she used her instrument to deliver ample, dense tones with rough timbres and powerful resonances, alternating arpeggios and saturations, moments of tension and weightlessness, twisting effects and release, in the image of her brief new album, Myuthafoo (2023).

Caterina Barbieri, at the controls of her modular synthesizer, live at the foot of Mount Etna.

Entirely realized with the aid of the modular, this collection of six tracks, composed around the time of the album Ecstatic Computation (2019) yet inspired by the energy of her recent tours, is emblematic of the electronic work of this young Berlin-based Italian composer, whose career kicked off in 2014 before enjoying her first international acclaim three years later with the release of Patterns of Consciousness, an album that brilliantly and modernly revisited motifs associated with minimalism and so-called "cosmic" music of the 1970s.

Born in 1990, the daughter of a saxophonist with a no-wave background and the granddaughter of an opera-trained singer, Barbieri began her musical training with classical guitar, notably at the Bologna Conservatory, while becoming interested in more radical musical genres in her teens, such as noise, metal and doom, whose physical, immersive dimension she appreciates. In 2013, while studying in Sweden at the prestigious Elektronmusikstudion, she discovered a passion for modular synthesizers (in particular the Buchla 200), an instrument that set her free and inspired her to begin a career as a composer. A year later, she signed her first album, the minimalist and austere Vertical, quickly followed by a series of four others, from Patterns of Consciousness (2017) to Spirit Exit (2022), which established her as one of the most promising artists of her generation.

Alongside a whole host of composers, most of them in their thirties, who willingly mix electronics and acoustics, including Kali Malone (with whom she collaborates), Aimée Portioli (Grand River), Sarah Davachi, Christina Vantzou and Kara-Lis Coverdale, Caterina Barbieri seems to put formalism at bay, demonstrating an approach that is both perceptual and spiritual, reminiscent of pioneering composers such as Éliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros and Laurie Spiegel. In the few interviews she grants, she claims to be passionate about the way sound affects our bodies and alters our consciousness, between ecstasy, trance and contemplation. Her relationship with her machines, she told Fact in 2018, has a spiritual dimension. She talks about the way her instruments give her the sensation of expressing, embodying and even touching her own feelings. The modular synthesizer gives her the power to contemplate sounds as objects, while at the same time becoming one with them, "as if the sounds were outside and inside you, as if I took the form of the sound and it managed to embrace my body and my affects".

Can we consider her new album as a form of self-portrait, as a fragmented sonic mirror of her author? Its title, Myuthafoo, an anagram of the title of one of her tracks, "Math of You", might suggest so. But rather than get bogged down in conjecture, it may suffice to point out here that the six tracks on this masterful album possess, in the image ofAphex Twin for example, a powerful vital force, as if the music obeyed principles of artificial life, freeing it from the shackles of formalism and the sometimes rigid structures of today's electronic music.

Jean-Yves Leloup

Caterina Barbieri, Myuthafoo (Light-Years/!K7 Music)
Reissue of the album Ecstatic Computation (Light-Years/!K7 Music), with a previously unreleased track, "Perennial Fantas", to be released on July 7.

Photo © Caterina Barbieri Fan Club