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Music

Caterina Barbieri's New Single is a Synth-Led Exploration of Sentience

"This Causes Consciousness to Fracture" is a 15-minute composition from her new album on Important Records.
Photo courtesy of the artist

Composer and analog synthesist Caterina Barbieri makes music that's designed to make you think. Whether you're the sort to get involved in process or product, her expansive compositions are the sort of synth explorations that leave lots of rabbit trails for listeners to follow. On April 21 she'll release her second full length Patterns of Consciousness on Important Records and true to form, it's full of vast pieces of electronic experimentation. Today, she's sharing "This Causes Consciousness to Fracture," the record's 15-minute opener. It shows off her knack for compositional contortion, bending fibrous synth lines around one another in mammoth, labyrinthine braids, which breathe and collapse in swimming fractal-like arrangements.

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As its title suggests, Patterns of Consciousness finds Barbieri explicitly concerning herself with the way we think. In the album's press materials she writes that "a pattern creates a certain state of consciousness." Slowly we start to understand its structure, and by disrupting the pattern, she thinks that we can unlock an understanding of "the layered nature of consciousness and the relativity of perception." Whether "This Causes Consciousness to Fracture" can perform that function for you depends on how willing you are to turn yourself over to it. But if you're the type to intensely study the slowly shifting architecture of a fifteen-minute synth piece, this is a good one to get lost in.

Listen here or pre-order over at the Important Records site.

Composer and analog synthesist Caterina Barbieri makes music that's designed to make you think. Whether you're the sort to get involved in process or product, her expansive compositions are the sort of synth explorations that leave lots of rabbit trails for listeners to follow. On April 21 she'll release her second full length Patterns of Consciousness on Important Records and true to form, it's full of vast pieces of electronic experimentation. Today, she's sharing "This Causes Consciousness to Fracture," the record's 15-minute opener. It shows off her knack for compositional contortion, bending fibrous synth lines around one another in mammoth, labyrinthine braids, which breathe and collapse in swimming fractal-like arrangements.

As its title suggests, Patterns of Consciousness finds Barbieri explicitly concerning herself with the way we think. In the album's press materials she writes that "a pattern creates a certain state of consciousness." Slowly we start to understand its structure, and by disrupting the pattern, she thinks that we can unlock an understanding of "the layered nature of consciousness and the relativity of perception." Whether "This Causes Consciousness to Fracture" can perform that function for you depends on how willing you are to turn yourself over to it. But if you're the type to intensely study the slowly shifting architecture of a fifteen-minute synth piece, this is a good one to get lost in.

Listen here or pre-order over at the Important Records site.