Caterina Barbieri - Spirit Exit

Caterina Barbieri's musical swirls overturn time and space. Listening to the Italian composer and modular synthesizer virtuoso since 2017's breakthrough double album Patterns Of Consciousness has been like traveling at the speed of light and in slow motion at the same time. Acclaimed 2019 album Ecstatic Computation took it even further with lead single 'Fantas', where the captivating melody hurtling towards its supernova climax felt like witnessing the life and death of a burning star. Her music stands far beyond any new age trope or modern synth trend, standing alone in its ecstatic intensity and cataclysmic emotional impact. Making her debut on her new label light-years, Barbieri now delivers her most profound work to date - a journey through an inner space as vast as space and as intimate as a heartbeat. The Spirit Exit opens and we fall inside.

Spirit Exit is Caterina Barbieri's time machine, which is primarily composed of a modular synthesizer, which the author considers more like a mechanical oracle. While previous albums were created on long tours and captured only snippets of works in progress, Spirit Exit represents the producer's first album completely written and recorded in her home studio in the middle of a two-month pandemic lockdown in Milan in 2020. It was during this extended isolation that she found inspiration in female philosophers , mystics and poets spread across time but united in their power to cultivate vast inner worlds. The basic mystical text of St. Teresa of Avila from the 16th century The Inner Castle, the posthuman theory of the philosopher Rosi Braidotti and the metaphysical poetry of Emily Dickinson act as thematic anchors of the entire Spirit Exit and impress the weight of life and death on the composer's most perceptive music to date.

More than any previous album, Spirit Exit crystallizes Barbieri's densely layered, dazzlingly clear synth arrangements, while introducing stunning new elements that seem to have always belonged to him. Strings and guitar weave flawlessly into the composer's web of modular patches, while her revealing singing voice often cuts right through them. Melodies remain a great passion and obsession for Barbieri - he sees them as knots he's trying to untangle, existential metaphors formed by tautly spiraling arpeggios - and on Spirit Exit they swell like planets before collapsing into atoms. Parts of one song can haunt another. The synth progression unraveling in "Knot Of Spirit" is reborn in "Broken Melody", an explosive climax with vocals that flash like a lightning storm. The sweeping "At Your Gamut" perfects the producer's dramatic, slow-moving openers, but in her first-ever use of sampling, it later crushes, accelerates, and turns beyond recognition into the ghostly hook that floats through "Terminal Clock" - an otherworldly sound rushing across something that feels like the author's the first composition for the dance floor.

Caterina Barbieri's music has always transported the listener, its constant movement achieved through complexities that do not need to be solved, but simply felt. Spirit Exit expresses this endless ascent - the destination unknown, the solution always just a stone's throw away - with a newfound humanity. It's the result of a unique artist thinking deeply about what music means to him, only to come back with an even greater understanding of what he can be. As the album closes with "The Landscape Listens" - a song that approaches death with all the gentle grace of Brian Eno's "An Ending (Ascent)" - I am reminded of a line from Emily Dickinson's "There's a certain slant of light". “When it comes - the landscape listens / Shadows - hold their breath.” Spirit Exit is a special kind of seance, an album so otherworldly and inexplicably moving that it leaves even its ghosts in stunned silence.