This lush and overpoweringly elegiac multi-instrumental reimagining of a Barbieri track by eight different artists reminds us that electronic music can be reinvigorated by classical instrumentation, and vice versa.
The concept is straightforward: eight artists remake Barbieri’s unforgettable opening track “Fantas” from her 2019 release Ecstatic Computation. The outcomes are anything but easy solutions to what might be construed as little more than a remix challenge, and each track is so distinctive that, if not for this unifying idea, these tracks could not otherwise have found a way to occupy the same release.
Voices calling out in some seemingly indigenous language wrap around and answer to each other like the complex muti-voice compositions of Kanye collaborator Caroline Shaw. It might be a prayer, a paean or some ancient shepherding call, but by the end the chorale reaches a point of cinematic crescendo that feels just short of religious. An altogether creepier or at least more agitated, the saxophone version seems to suffer under the weight of its Sisyphean task, doomed to repeat the same six notes on rising and falling envelopes of expert finger-work for seven minutes and eighteen seconds. If the saxophone was sentimental, the organ version is a downright dirge, something Nick Cave might sing over on a particularly dour record.
Some of the best electronic music to ever exist hardly even registers or declares itself as such: look back at the roots of modular synthesis; at the works of Wendy Carlos or Elaine Radigue for example, who turned classical music on its head by digitizing them, and then deleting traces of the digital. In so doing, they changed the way we think about music and composition forever. A similar logic is at play here: a piece of electronic music by Barbieri can be reinvigorated both by “organic” instruments like the saxophone, and by making it even more “electronic” still. This lush and overpoweringly elegiac multi-instrumental reimagining of a Barbieri track by eight different artists reminds us that electronic music can be reinvigorated by classical instrumentation, and vice versa.
None of the cosmic beauty is lost when the interpretations double down on the electronic origin of the art. On “Singleli Fantas,” frenetic drums and polyrhythms help us hear a kind of feral loneliness or fear that existed in the first recordings, but wasn’t as obvious before this track spelled it out. The hardcore version, one track later, completes this conceptual circle by applying pressure to the sore spot: the fear exploding into urgent pheromonal signaling. Resynthesized for the 808 and 202, it becomes dreamy electronica, the kind that may pour out over a sea of festival goers under a starry desert sky.
No more boxes, this gorgeous record seems to plead, no more absurd and territorial gerrymandering between the myriad micro genres music insists on splitting itself into, now more than ever. In the end there is only frequency and emotion.
-Winston Mann
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