I was pretty excited to get my ears around this one. Barbieri’s Patterns Of Consciousness was one of my records of 2017, and Born Again In The Voltage was almost as good. So, how does this new album stack up?
The thing that made me adore Patterns so much was its awesome precision. It had a scattergun approach to melody, sometimes lurching between registers in the middle of a phrase several times in quick succession, but it always felt like every aspect was perfectly engineered on the basis of some guiding principle — and, judging by the liner notes, it probably was. It was like the most brilliantly controlled chaos. By contrast, Born Again (which was released a year after Patterns but recorded a couple of years earlier) was a bit fuzzier around the edges, something which at the time I attributed to a less finely honed skill. Well, Ecstatic Computation is in some ways more like Born Again. It shares a slightly looser feel, possibly connected to a wider range of instruments, and even a rather smashing wordless vocal line by Annie Gärlid and Evelyn Saylor on Arrows Of Time. The sort of swishy hitting-a-wire-fence noise that starts Closest Approach To Your Orbit is positively messy. And yet it does feel controlled in the same way that Patterns did. I suppose that it may be a greater accomplishment, broadening your scope and letting things be a bit more free while retaining that precision. And this is a very fine record and one I’m glad to give cabinet space to. But I’ve got to admit that I do still miss the purity of Patterns.
I bought this from Boomkat. They call it Electronic.
dogrando writes about some records 