Caterina Barbieri’s synthscapes will transport you to a different dimension

Listening to Caterina Barbieri's music is a deeply profound experience. The Italian composer has spent the past ten years creating transcendental synthscapes that gradually unfurl over time, with celestial modular melodies that project listeners to otherworldly dimensions. On Myuthafoo, the musician's fifth full-length album, Barbieri explores the psychophysical effects of sound with pattern-based compositions that expand and transmute and adopt a life of their own. "I’m interested in the creative uses of repetition as a form of psychedelia," she begins. "It's a very important tool in music to hypnotise and lead the listener into a higher state of consciousness."

The Bologna-born artist first came onto the scene in 2017 with her breakthrough album Patterns of Consciousness, which explored how patterns of sound can literally alter consciousness. This is best experienced in her live shows, often taking place in unconventional locations – abandoned car parks, marble quarries, Mount Etna – that play with space and dimensions to conjure feelings of vastness. Often regarded as one of modular synth's brightest voices – she learned how to use vintage synths at Stockholm's famed Elektronmusikstudion, performing everywhere from concert halls to Boiler Room – her music is charged with theory-tinged experimentalism, building on a longstanding tradition of composers (Laurie Anderson, Pauline Oliveros) using quantum listening to inhabit meditative planes of existence.

Myuthafoo is an anagram of "Math Of You", a track on the record, and exists as a sister album to 2019's Ecstatic Computation – "it came out from the same creative flow," she explains. Across six new tracks, the album builds on Barbieri's existing method, which fuses analog and creative sequences to conjure semi-random melodies, and where the machine takes an active role in shaping the sound. "You can play with the unpredictability and chaos that machines can bring, because you end up with happy accidents," she explains. "Playing with these machines is a bit like accepting this vision of life: life is chaos, and sometimes it's very violent too."

For Barbieri, the experience of working with the machine is innately spiritual. Drawing parallels to the word ‘object’, the Latin root of which translates to ‘opposing resistance’, she describes the ongoing dialogue between herself and the analogue hardware, working with its limitations to channel the beauty of the natural world. "Modulars are entities that oppose resistance in a very deep sense," she points out. "The tension creates a ritualistic element because in order to get the instrument to do what you want, you need to spend time with it."

This personal philosophy towards sound and its transmutations is best experienced in her live shows, where the music morphs like a living organism, feeding back into her compositions before they crystallise in record form: "It's the core of my practice because music is really this living organism that keeps developing." Through this chaos, the impermanence and unpredictability of machines, Barbieri guides listeners through a trans-dimensional trip that breaks away from mind-body binaries into a metaphysical realm, where technology and biology are intertwined, and temporal structures of past and present dissolve. "Life is too beautiful to be tamed," she says.

The intimate connection between human and nature is central to Barbieri's practice. Her music takes you outside your body. "When you listen to sound, you become that sound, and you become hyper receptive to what's surrounding you – and other people," she expands. It allows us to step outside the individual self, bringing us closer to an interconnected way of being, and establishing deeper connections to the Earth and to one another. As Barbieri puts it: "That real sense of really losing the boundaries of your ego and really merging into a bigger and larger perspective where you’re in touch with something bigger that is nature or the cosmos."

Myuthafoo is out via Light Years on June 16