Caterina Barbieri - Myuthafoo

Italian composer Caterina Barbieri has spent most of the decade breaking down the rigid structures of electronic music and using advanced, idiosyncratic techniques to build bridges between academic experimental, dance and pop environments. Her breakthrough moment came in 2017 with the album "Patterns of Consciousness" released on Important Records, a confident fusion of analog synthesis and algorithmic compositional methodology that defined her unique voice. And when she followed it up in 2019 with the album "Ecstatic Computation" on the legendary Editions Mego label, she received widespread acclaim and critics praised its strong fusion of minimalism and trance-inducing synthesizer experiments. Pitchfork described her music as "mind-altering" and "a dream machine for the ears".

"Myuthafoo" was created at the same time as "Ecstatic Computation", which Barbieri considers a sister album. Both albums are based on creative sequential processes that playfully reveal Barbieri's deep-rooted interest in time, space, memory and emotion. And since she was about to reissue "Ecstatic Computation" on her own light-years label, it made sense to accompany the album with this tightly-knit collection of previously unreleased recordings. At the time, Barbieri was touring extensively, and her process began to change in response to this nomadic, interactive energy. Using an Orthogonal ER-101 modular sequencer, Barbieri manually programmed patterns into the device and fed them into her arsenal of noise generators, trying different combinations at each performance.