Interview: minimalist electronic artist Catarina Barbieri

We talk about her introduction to synthesis and avoiding iconic synth timbres

Place / Event > Concert, Conference

With the final programme for Loop - Ableton's music summit - being announced, we took the opportunity to catch up with one of the artists on the roster. We talk to Berlin-based Italian minimalist electronic artist, Caterina Barbieri whose 2017 record Patterns of Consciousness has received critical acclaim and even been named in several Best of 2017' music round-ups.

Having started her musical career with the study of classical guitar at the Conservatory in Bologna, Barbieri was first introduced to electronic music through noise and metal concerts in her teens. Following high school, she began a programme in Electronic Music, but it was her encounter with the Buchla 200 system during her studies at the Royal College of Music, Stockholm, in 2013 that really set her down the path of electronic composition. The Buchla taught me a way of listening to sound that years of training in classical music never taught me. Suddenly I started hearing all this subatomic dance of particles wrapped in a waveform. And that's how all started. says Barbieri.

Paths Less Trodden

Patterns of Consciousness is an original work that doesn't recycle the sonics of its forebears to connect with its audience. This is immediately apparent when you listen to the first track, and according to Barbieri, this was a very deliberate move. In general I try to avoid iconic timbres from legendary synthesisers that are immediately recognisable and deeply embedded in our music culture. I use simple waveforms because I want to minimize the extra-musical, extrinsic cultural references of my sound and keep the identification of the sound source blurred. When the listener fails to grasp the source behind a sound, she/he engages with a more active listening attitude, reliant on the intrinsic properties of sound as a physical object rather than the extrinsic properties of sound as a cultural object. In this way I find the perception of the sound object itself is enhanced and refreshed.

It's this approach, perhaps, that heightens the emotional impact of the 70-minute opus as, by Barbieri's own admission, it's not by design. Actually I have no clear idea of the emotional intention with a composition before I begin to compose. I've noticed I have a natural attraction for certain combinations of notes, like a melodic and harmonic taste that always comes back when I start writing something. But I think that the emotional aspect of my music is actually the less intentional one.

Shaping The Musical Brain

The synthesizer has clearly shaped Caterina's compositional approach, as she explains: I think that in first place the practice on synthesisers helped me developing an attentive and active listening attitude towards the microscopic properties of sound. And that's because synthesisers offer the possibility to shape timbre on a microscopic level and actively experience acoustic and psychoacoustic phenomena in first person. You can study FM modulation in a book but experiencing it and being able to control it with your hands it's way different. It's like learning a new language. You cannot just read sentences on a book and expect to learn them. The brain will hold new sentences only once you have actively used them a reasonable number of times. And the same goes for audio concepts. I feel that not only the mind but also the body has to process them to grasp them in high resolution.

After a certain exposure to a stream of sound you can actively interact with, you gain a better understanding not only of the sound in itself but also of its effects on you and therefore of your own mechanisms of perception. And that's pretty amazing! Probably the most valuable experience that the practice on synthesisers brought into my compositional process.

The stream of sound is another interesting aspect of analog synthesisers. Synths are fields of continuous electricity. Sound flows constantly. You don't press a button to play or stop a musical process. The idea of composing from silence by means of an additive design as well as the start/stop logic related to the digital practice are undermined. You tune yourself to an ongoing sound field and make it selective. Eventually, the music is already there even before you start. In this perspective, composition becomes an act of subtraction rather than a demiurgic act of creation from scratch. This shifts the attention from the object and subject of perception to the field where the perception is occurring, a non-specific viewpoint .

And this is very much what I was looking for when I bought my Verbos Harmonic Oscillator, which is the only sound source of my last work Patterns of Consciousness (Important Records, 2017). I wanted to start from the full spectrum of a sound and then being able to filter it into its partials and derive melodic information from its harmonic sound continuum.

Audio titled Caterina Barbieri - Patterns Of Consciousness - Album excerpts - 2LP April1 2017 by importantrecords

Another module that really shaped my musical brain is the Indexed Quad Sequencer ER-101 from Orthogonal Devices. I bought it because I wanted to work with massive pattern generation and this module allows to write super long patterns and work with different Math Operations (Arithmetic, Geometric, Random, Jitter) to expand and develop patterns. It's the brain of my setup and it's the perfect device to bring structure and repeatability inside the chaotic environments that modular synthesis is (in)famous for. I wanted to explore the power of sound repetition and its psycho-physical effects, and the powerful sequencing capabilities of the ER-101 turned out to be a big source of inspiration in this sense.

Through this module I

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