The music of Italian composer and multi-instrumentalist Caterina Barbieri shimmers and pulses at the intersection of ambient, new age, minimalist electronics, and drone. She uses primarily modular synthesizers to build her tracks, creating canvases of sustained tones that spread flat like aural wallpaper and then splashing them with digital and analog color, including guitar, strings, moaning vocals, and a variety of electronic bloops, bleeps, and runs that recalls composers as diverse as Giorgio Moroder, Vangelis, and Bach. Listening to Barbieri’s latest album, 2023’s Myuthafoo (released on her own Light-Years imprint), is like being dipped into an 80s vision of the future as imagined in Tron or Space Invaders. It’s ecstatic digitized nostalgic transcendence that sprinkles its retro vibes with intimations of other genres and tomorrows. “Memory Leak” is full of distorted shrieks and feedback-laden harsh noise; “Alphabet of Light” is quiet and crystalline, pattering toward the barely there whispers and gestures of lowercase music; and “Math of You” is hyped-up fruity chiptune yoked to algorithmic repetition. Whatever mix of influences Barbieri is floating through, though, she turns everything she picks up into carefully calibrated cathedrals of bliss where robot dreams chase each other beneath the stars. It’s electronica that’s less for dancers and more for people who want to lie down on a digital beach and watch waves of light roll gently in and out of the computer screens in their brains.
Caterina Barbieri KMRU opens. Tue 9/24, 8 PM, Epiphany Center for the Arts, 201 S. Ashland, $47.38, all ages
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