Caterina Barbieri’s music is always two things at once: incredibly fast-paced and infinitely slow, extremely uplifting and a complete downer, full of flashy euphoria and greyscale apathy. This is also the case on »Spirit Exit«, the first album on her own label light-years, which follows her biggest success to date, »Ecstatic Computation«. The musical means and thus also the sound have expanded: in addition to the pointillist sounds arising from Barbieri’s modular system, strings and guitar have been added, and the composer sings much more than in previous releases. This gives these pieces an even poppier and at the same time more sacral feeling, thus charging Barbieri’s music with yet another dualism. This makes equally free-flowing synth-only pieces like »Knot of Spirit (Synth Version)« seem all the more like overambitious Klaus Schulze homages at first. But this piece, too, breaks out of the self-imposed limitation at some point and finds its salvation in interlocking arpeggios that convey the ultimate Barbieri feeling: the nervous anticipation, learned on the dance floor, of the kick drum that will hopefully soon enter the picture and the latent ecstatic feeling that the drop will in fact never come. Barbieri’s true art, after all, is to keep things suspended between one pole and the other in a wonderfully tantalising way – as on »Spirit Exit«.
Claire Rousay
The Bloody Lady
Viernulvier