Track of Notes: 2/7/2025
Barker is neither kicking nor screaming
Barker - “Reframing”
Kick drums hate him because of one weird trick. "I came to the realisation that music is a reasonably complex behavioral science," Barker, a Berlin-located British producer, told DJ Mag in 2019, "where you signal certain things and you create predictable responses... dance music has gone into a manipulative realm. You have this universally recognised signal, the kick-drum, that comes in and says the same thing over and over again: 'dance, dance, dance'."
So, how does a producer break an audience out of those B.F. Skinner-esque dance, dance, dance cues? The trick was to remove the kick drums altogether. "...a few years later, I was back in Hong Kong with my friend Taku Hirayama," Barker said to XKR8R. "We were listening to Digital Justice It's All Gone Pear Shaped, joking about playing a whole set that sounds like a breakdown and never 'drops.' The more I thought about it, the more I realised it might be an interesting thing to try to make dance music that doesn't rely on percussion. After that, it became a more sincere experiment, and I focused much more of my attention on it."
The result was the landmark Debiasing, a four-song EP released in 2018 that drew attention because of what wasn't there. Though the kick drums were subbed out, Debiasing was still amazingly active, eschewing ambient in the traditional sense thanks to its attention-grabbing rhythmic complexity, a fractal expansion of glittering tones. Tracks like "Cascade Effect" continue to build and build and build, adding oodles of cross-rhythms on top of stretched synth textures, as if you were standing between trance and dub techno festivals. In other words, mission accomplished: you could dance, dance, dance to it.
"The approach with Debiasing was to make huge layered drone chords with multiple poly-synths and open filters, squeeze as much energy into a chord pattern as possible, then make it spikey and percussive by dynamically processing it through the modular," Barker explained to XKR8R, later adding: "Debiasing felt like the right length, at around 20 minutes, and if carried on in the same vein, the aesthetic could easily have got tiring, I think. So I wanted to make the record as broad and diverse as possible while staying within the concept as much as possible."
Utility, Barker's 2019 debut LP, flipped Debiasing by stretching out, not in a chronometric sense, but by widening the timbral palette. In turn, Barker increased the emotional impact. Utility is as much an album you can feel as hear.
Sonically, Utility has much more in common with Aphex Twin's SAW experiments or Leon Vynehall's "Midnight On Rainbow Road," these almost psychedelic smears of meditative electronic music. The accompanying liner notes called the album "alien and emotionally recognizable," which is that prime oxymoronic space in which Barker thrives.
That doesn't mean Barker left Debiasing behind. If you sucked the warmth out of "Posmean," you'd get something close to what Barker was previously tinkering with. But that's just it: warmth. Utility is a wonderfully warm and inviting album that wraps you up in these lush tones. Even when it's colder, it's like feeling a fall breeze on your face while you're wrapped in a velvet blanket. And no track, perhaps, does that better than the nine-minute closer "Die-Hards Of The Darwinian Order." Does it have kicks? It does. But they're not foregrounded, not driving the listener to dance with a Pavlovian pummel. Instead, they're a textural element, something that fades into the other repetitious elements that are layered in such a way that the track feels like it's endlessly evolving. Evolving repetition: that's where Barker is at.
After a couple excellent EPs, including kick-drum-inclined Unfixed, which was my 19th favorite release in 2023, we find Barker to his repetition tricks on the forthcoming Stochastic Drift. "Reframing," the first single, is well-titled. Instead of Utility's warmth, it has the shimmer of Barker's remix for Tangerine Dream, which I'll cover below. How is Barker reframing his music, then?
"I'd been working with an approach that was quite deliberate and goal-oriented before, but I realised this wasn't so helpful in the context of uncertainty," Barker is quoted as saying in the liner notes. "Being suddenly unemployed and stuck at home for an indefinite amount of time, with one disruption after another, it was like the target kept moving, and I didn't know what to aim at. I noticed this unpredictability starting to creep into what I was making, and tracks were ending up a long way from the intentions they started with. So the challenge for this record was to try to embrace that process, to let go of expectations."
"Reframing" begins like any in Barker's current solo stretch, but soon it explodes. It's this out-of-nowhere boom, the type of thing Barker would've suppressed on Debiasing, but here it bursts to the fore. It's not predictable. It's not manipulative. No, it's just Barker blowing apart conventions without leaving the realm of the familiar. Once more, it's a hell of a trick. There are a lot more up his sleeve.
Tangerine Dream - "Continuum (Barker remix)"
The best track on one of Tangerine Dream's better albums gets the Barker treatment, sucking out the drums in favor of strobing synths. The trick pushes the melody up front, and man, what a melody, this sequenced pitter-patter progression. "Continuum" might end up being one of my favorite songs of 2020s, and Barker's take is almost as sublime as the OG. Killer.
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