Listening to Caterina Barbieri’s music is a deeply profound experience. The Italian composer has spent the past ten years creating transcendental synthscapes that steadily 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 lifetime of their very own. “I’m concerned about the creative uses of repetition as a type of psychedelia,” she begins. “It’s a vital tool in music to hypnotise and lead the listener into the next state of consciousness.”

The Bologna-born artist first got here onto the scene in 2017 together with her breakthrough album Patterns of Consciousness, which explored how patterns of sound can literally alter consciousness. That is best experienced in her live shows, often happening in unconventional locations – abandoned automotive parks, marble quarries, Mount Etna – that play with space and dimensions to conjure feelings of vastness. Often considered one in all modular synth’s brightest voices – she learned methods to use vintage synths at Stockholm’s famed Elektronmusikstudion, performing in all places from concert halls to Boiler Room – her music is charged with theory-tinged experimentalism, constructing 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 got here out from the identical creative flow,” she explains. Across six recent tracks, the album builds on Barbieri’s existing method, which fuses analog and inventive sequences to conjure semi-random melodies, and where the machine takes an lively role in shaping the sound. “You may play with the unpredictability and chaos that machines can bring, because you find yourself with blissful accidents,” she explains. “Fidgeting 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 continuing dialogue between herself and the analogue hardware, working with its limitations to channel the fantastic thing about the natural world. “Modulars are entities that oppose resistance in a really deep sense,” she points out. “The stress creates a ritualistic element because in an effort to get the instrument to do what you wish, you might want 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 de facto 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 right into a metaphysical realm, where technology and biology are intertwined, and temporal structures of past and present dissolve. “Life is simply 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. “While you take heed to sound, you turn into that sound, and also you turn into hyper receptive to what’s surrounding you – and other people,” she expands. It allows us to step outside the person self, bringing us closer to an interconnected way of being, and establishing deeper connections to the Earth and to at least one one other. As Barbieri puts it: “That real sense of really losing the boundaries of your ego and really merging into an even bigger and bigger perspective where you’re in contact with something larger that’s nature or the cosmos.”

Myuthafoo is out via Light Years on June 16