Uploaded March 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Over the past 10 years, Italian composer Caterina Barbieri has created transcendent musical experiences, combining modular synthesis with vocals and other forms of instrumentation to create a distinctively emotive musical signature, most notably on her albums Patterns of Consciousness and Ecstatic Computation.
For Barbieri, music is the meeting point of the material and the immaterial. “I like to think of sound as a spiral that connects the physical world with the metaphysical world,” she tells Fact in our new film exploring her performance and practice. “In that sense sound really brings you outside of your ego and your physical boundaries.”
Following the isolation of the pandemic, Barbieri found herself craving shared artistic experiences. She launched a new platform and live concept called light-years and released an album, Spirit Exit, all of which had musical collaboration at their heart.
In this film, shot by Fact as Barbieri returned to live performance and debuted the light-years concept around Europe, the artist shares her innermost thoughts on music, sound, composition and collaboration amidst exclusive live footage shot at Berlin’s Metabolic Rift, London’s Southbank Centre, Italy’s Nextones Festival and the volcanic environment of Mount Etna in Sicily.
Credits:
Directed and produced by Pedro S. Küster
Filmed by
Sven Gutjahr
Laima Leyton
Sofia Kuster
Live Sound Engineering by
Bridget Ferrill
Sound by
Pedro S. Küster
Music:
'Fantas Variation for Voices' a rework by Evelyn Saylor of Caterina Barbieri's composition 'Fantas'. Performed by Evelyn Saylor, Sara Persico, Michelle Cheung, Lydia Saylor at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London.
'Magma' (working title) written and performed by Caterina Barbieri and Bendik Giske at Metabolic Rift, Berlin Kraftwerk and Nextones, Val D'Ossola.
'At your Gamut' written and performed by Caterina Barbieri at Mount Etna, Sicily.
'Arrows of Time' written by Caterina Barbieri. Performed by Caterina Barbieri, UCC Harlo, Evelyn Saylor at Metabolic Rift, Berlin Kraftwerk.
'Perennial Fantas' written and performed by Caterina Barbieri Metabolic Rift, Berlin Kraftwerk.
Light design by MFO.
Thanks to Bendik Giske, Nkisi, MFO, Evelyn Saylor, Michelle Cheung, Sara Persico, Lydia Saylor for their participation to the light-years shows.
Over the past 10 years, Italian composer Caterina Barbieri has created transcendent musical experiences, combining modular synthesis with vocals and other forms of instrumentation to create a distinctively emotive musical signature, most notably on her albums Patterns of Consciousness and Ecstatic Computation.
For Barbieri, music is the meeting point of the material and the immaterial. “I like to think of sound as a spiral that connects the physical world with the metaphysical world,” she tells Fact in our new film exploring her performance and practice. “In that sense sound really brings you outside of your ego and your physical boundaries.”
Following the isolation of the pandemic, Barbieri found herself craving shared artistic experiences. She launched a new platform and live concept called light-years and released an album, Spirit Exit, all of which had musical collaboration at their heart.
In this film, shot by Fact as Barbieri returned to live performance and debuted the light-years concept around Europe, the artist shares her innermost thoughts on music, sound, composition and collaboration amidst exclusive live footage shot at Berlin’s Metabolic Rift, London’s Southbank Centre, Italy’s Nextones Festival and the volcanic environment of Mount Etna in Sicily.
Credits:
Directed and produced by Pedro S. Küster
Filmed by
Sven Gutjahr
Laima Leyton
Sofia Kuster
Live Sound Engineering by
Bridget Ferrill
Sound by
Pedro S. Küster
Music:
'Fantas Variation for Voices' a rework by Evelyn Saylor of Caterina Barbieri's composition 'Fantas'. Performed by Evelyn Saylor, Sara Persico, Michelle Cheung, Lydia Saylor at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London.
'Magma' (working title) written and performed by Caterina Barbieri and Bendik Giske at Metabolic Rift, Berlin Kraftwerk and Nextones, Val D'Ossola.
'At your Gamut' written and performed by Caterina Barbieri at Mount Etna, Sicily.
'Arrows of Time' written by Caterina Barbieri. Performed by Caterina Barbieri, UCC Harlo, Evelyn Saylor at Metabolic Rift, Berlin Kraftwerk.
'Perennial Fantas' written and performed by Caterina Barbieri Metabolic Rift, Berlin Kraftwerk.
Light design by MFO.
Thanks to Bendik Giske, Nkisi, MFO, Evelyn Saylor, Michelle Cheung, Sara Persico, Lydia Saylor for their participation to the light-years shows.
![Aurélien Bernard - (reed) [Feat. Shabaka Hutchings]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/K3VzakaaY-Q/mqdefault.jpg "Aurélien Bernard - (reed) [Feat. Shabaka Hutchings]
“I am a big advocate of entry points – when you end that circle you always reach the center point,” says London jazz visionary and band leader Shabaka Hutchings in (reed), a meditative portrait of the musician and treatise on ritual and creativity from filmmaker Aurélien Bernard. “The center point is a point of communality in the way that there is no sense of strain in the sound,” continues Hutchings. “It feels like it is a very direct connection between inhalation and exhalation.” The non-linear trajectory between the entry point and the centre, mapped out by the musician with the audience in tow in the moment of performance, is the space Bernard explores in (reed), tracing how a simple ritual, like preparing a saxophone’s reed, can serve as a window into som of the inexplicable power of sound.
“Since sounds differ in their outer expression, this results in space stretching between function and
existence, between performance and effect,” explains Bernard. “It seems the deeper we explore the mystery of sound, the more we are able to trace what’s connecting them. These links are what the musician acknowledges as harmony, which asks how repetition and movements could impact, through rhythm and expression, the search for this harmony.” Though the path of this search might be uncertain, Hutchings’ ritualistic approach to performance enables an initial certainty, the first firm foothold of complex climb, something Bernard picks out in monochromatic close focus, foregrounding his his fingers, his lips and his throat.
Setting Hutchings’ playing in counterpoint against the foggy ambience of Space Afrika‘s 2018 modern classic, Somewhere Decent To Live, Bernard exposes the process of finding solid forms within clouds of what the musician describes as “an undefined source of energy, or power, or knowledge, whatever you want to describe it as.” As though coaxing raw blasts of blistering saxophone from Space Afrika’s dubbed-out smudges, (reed) itself serves as a glimpse into Hutchings’ process, winding its way from words, the nascent sparks of inspiration, through measured inhalation into an urgent exhalation, a burst of sound that arrives through the musician’s ritual, from grounded reed to transcendent frequency.
You can find Aurélien Bernard on Instagram. You can find Shabaka Hutchings on Instagram and his website. You can find Space Afrika on Instagram and at Bandcamp.")
