light-years

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	<title>light-years</title>
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	<pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2026 08:06:44 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>ly009</title>
				
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		<pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2026 08:06:44 +0000</pubDate>

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light-years: ly009


Caterina Barbieri and Bendik Giske - At Source


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Caterina Barbieri &#38;amp; Bendik Giske's At Source resounds music as wellspring, that which is essential and unknowable, and yet utterly primary. It finds two acclaimed composer-musicians building a world together in self-contained collaboration between analogue synthesis and an extended approach to the saxophone that conjures its own universe of sound. It is at once intimate and cosmic, drawing on the challenges and possibilities of their artistic exchange, tearing down technique to access all the expansive possibilities of their sonic meeting point.
 
At Source is a document of the world of sound to be conjured when two artists strive for something together, discovering the expansions and limitations of performance by bodies and machines. It is not an exercise in assimilation, but in productive exchange and creative confrontation. It does not draw on outside energies or influences, but grapples with what there is to find in their respective playing. "It also reflects how natural the collaboration was," says Barbieri, "a meeting at the source which was spontaneous, graceful and natural". 
Barbieri and Giske first met and were enthralled by one another's performances at Kunsthaus Glarus in 2019, a meeting that spurred conversations on the power of transitions as a compositional force. Giske later contributed a rework of Fantas for Fantas Variations (Editions Mego, 2021), an ambitious undertaking to rescore Barbieri’s work for his saxophone and voice, a challenge Giske had started undertaking two years prior as an ongoing practice of transcription. “The request came as a proof of aligned ideas”, says Giske.

Their new collaborative project then started during an artistic residency in Milan’s ICA in 2021, by invitation of swiss artist and curator Jan Vorisek, as the world was emerging from lockdown. This meeting, and the preceding closure of sites for cultural exchange, made their work together 'feel like springtime' says Barbieri. Giske, who was on the brink of releasing his sophomore album, Cracks, then joined Barbieri's light-years tour, which functioned as an inaugural incarnation of her newborn label and platform through a series of multi-artist curated shows with appearances of Lyra Pramuk, Nkisi, MFO, among other artists. 

Through the tour, they continued to develop material live, and this record, laid down in the studio, is true to that ever-evolving process of creation, where live feedback stays essential to the vitality of this collaborative effort. The tracks are each named with two evocative words that contain the two poles of their sound. Theirs is both abstract and cosmic, in the synth as machine undermined by Barbieri's naturalistic playing, and in Giske's continuous exploration of the symbiosis between his instrument, voice, and body. These binaries, of body and machine, posed various challenges, notably in how the stepped patterns Barbieri uses were near-impossible to translate for Giske's body to perform, and other times where mathematical resolutions were needed to sync their playing. Explains Giske: "It forced me to go to the core of what I am and what I have to offer”. Barbieri says that it "explores the liminality between the machine and the human, and the vulnerability in this process".  

On 'Intuition, Nimbus', the first track to be written, Giske's playing flutters and rises on Barbieri's synth, like a flock of birds lifted skywards on thermal columns, with clouds of pulsing tones fanning avian wings. 'Alignment, Orbit' settles into a steady torque, Giske's gentle percussions syncing with shifting loops, steadily building energy and conjuring solidity from breath and resistance. The extended 'Impatience, Magma' stretches glowing and languorous, honing in on and picking up a synth melody with whetted edge that cuts through the firmament, populating a broad cosmos of extended tones and replicating patterns in a piece that calls to mind Laurie Spiegel's extended works, and steps into transcendent duet with Giske's saxophone at its most keening and spiritual in tone and movement. 'Persistence, Buds' unfurls gracefully in sensuous sympatico, as saxophone caresses Barbieri's slowly twirling progressions, a tactile and meditative closer.
  
At Source is testament to two divergent practices finding a whole cosmos in which to convene; music is crystalised and made utterly enveloping through the focused and critical work of two musicians working at their peak. The versions here are, temptingly, "just one of many versions" of this abundant source material Giske explains. Like the best collaborations, At Source is more than the sum of its parts – bringing more to the feast than the simple combination of two musicians, promising versions upon versions of the exquisite material captured here.


CREDITS


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		<title>ly008</title>
				
		<link>https://l-years.com/ly008</link>

		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2025 07:58:48 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>light-years</dc:creator>

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light-years: ly008


Georg Gatsas - The Process


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The Process is the first book from light-years, the independent music label founded by Caterina Barbieri in 2021. It brings together Swiss artist Georg Gatsas’s early photographic work, documenting New York’s underground music and art scenes between 2002 and 2007. Alongside the large format reproductions of photographs, the book presents a vast collection of record covers, garments, correspondence, and ephemera from Georg’s personal archive. 

Georg Gatsas (b. 1978, Switzerland) is an artist who uses still and moving photography to map the intersections between creativity, location, memory, and focus. A steadfast participant in DIY and underground creative communities, he has spent his life unveiling the connections that bind artists across genre, generation, and identity. Solo exhibitions of his work have been mounted by Kunsthalle St. Gallen, Switzerland; The Swiss Institute, New York; and JUBG, Cologne. His work has appeared in The Wire, zweikommasieben, and ANP Quarterly, and monographs dedicated to Georg’s photography have been published by Nieves (Switzerland) and Loose Joints (France and UK). 

Spanning 2002 - 2007, The Process was Georg’s first major series, documenting five years of life in New York City. It’s an alienating span of time, bookended by September 11 on one side and the emergence of the smartphone on the other. The terrified, reactionary America of these five years craved comfort and safety, but a spiky, risky underground coalesced in that creative dead zone. In Georg’s words, “There was a sense of most of the world not understanding. And this is an opportunity.” The predominant culture’s patriotism and assuredness left a lot of unsupervised space for individuals interested in addressing fear and danger. It sometimes felt as if entire city blocks had been abandoned, the remnants corrupted and rebuilt by bands and artists, by concerts and exhibitions with small, dedicated audiences. This was the terrain of The Process. 

Georg sought out the people wandering this terrain, and made portrait of them: Genesis P-Orridge, Black Dice, Antipop Consortium, Kembra Pfahler, Ira Cohen and Stephonik Youth. These are not artists bound together by generation or gesture, rather they are connected through their dedication and intention. They share a sense of refusal, and an ability to see the opportunity in not being understood, in not being recuperable. Everyone in these photos is on edge, tense and tightly-wound. Their faces display the same resistance that you hear in their songs and read in their words. Georg matched their focus and ruthlessness in his photographs. The direct eye contact is consistent. The camera’s unobstructed harshness is consistent. Even the non-portrait photos—a cat-filled alley or an empty parking lot—ask the same questions about belonging, about looking away. About the potential of a broken umbrella, or the everyday ad hoc approaches to evading systemic annihilation. 

The Process is the first book issued by light-years, the independent label founded by Caterina Barbieri in 2021. Light-years is known best for densely-crafted, labyrinthine compositions, and The Process is no exception. Alongside the large format reproductions of photographs, the book presents a vast collection of record covers, garments, correspondence, and ephemera from Georg’s personal archive. Alternating between Georg’s portraits, these archival spreads are initially obscured from view through the use of an antiquated printing technique which leaves the top edge of the book uncut. The folded gathering at the top edge of each page must be sliced with a sharp edge to reveal the book in its entirety, a practice entirely familiar to 19th century readers, but nearly forgotten today. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé rejoiced in the process of separating pages with a blade, noting the action was the only way to introduce movement to a book. In his 1895 essay The Book: A Spiritual Instrument, Mallarmé wrote that the uncut foldings “invite the kind of sacrifice that made the red edges of ancient tomes bleed; I mean that they invite the paper-knife, which stakes our claims to possession of the book.” 

This design ultimately makes clear the intent of The Process, and of Georg’s practice as a whole. Reflecting on this incipient body of work decades after its completion, Georg observed, “You can see I just started.” It sounds like an admission that he’d only just begun using the camera in those years, but it can be reframed as an affirmation, an understanding that he jumped in and used the camera without hesitation. That he didn’t fret, didn’t strategize. That movement must be introduced, even blood, but this dedication and resistance is within reach for anyone with the will to reach out for it, to stake the claim.
(Ethan Swan)


CREDITS


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		<title>ly007</title>
				
		<link>https://l-years.com/ly007</link>

		<pubDate>Thu, 01 Aug 2024 09:08:08 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>light-years</dc:creator>

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light-years: ly007


Walter Zanetti - Cantos Yoruba de Cuba


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Santería draws heavily on music for its ceremonies. This Afro-Cuban syncretic religion, sometimes called La Regla de Ocha, saw the Orisha deities of the West African Yoruba peoples codified with Catholic saints. Yoruba practitioners, brought by force to the West, continued to worship their gods under the nose of those who sought to dehumanize them by adopting their spiritual language. 

The chants that became Santería’s prayers were often accompanied by the beat of the batá drum. This heartbeat runs through every invocation, through every sacred song. In the same way that the shuffling chains on the feet of enslaved African peoples dancing defiantly in Colombia birthed the distinctive rhythm of cumbia, syncretism has been present in music as much as it has in religion. It has always been about challenging the odds, about creation, creativity, and heart. 

This is why Italian musician Walter Zanetti’s guitar pierces straight to the soul on his Cantos Yoruba de Cuba. The guitarist’s latest album, light-years’ seventh release and its first outside the realm of electronic music, draws directly from the work of Cuban guitarist-composers José Angel Navarro and the late Hector Angulo. The 15-track album of new recordings from Zanetti brings together six original compositions by Navarro dictated to the Italian guitarist on a month-long trip to Cuba and reinterpretations of Angulo’s nine original Cantos Yoruba de Cuba, which give the record its name. 

“I have always had a strong attraction for rhythm and polyrhythm. These aspects presented themselves to me in a surprising way when listening to Navarro's music, from which I perceived an extraordinary expressive force linked not only to the pure invention of the author but also to a centuries-old musical tradition with strong African roots,” says Zanetti. 

A frequent visitor to Cuba, Zanetti first connected with Navarro’s work when he discovered the latter’s first album Miel, a work that itself draws from Yoruba chants, as well as the music of Afro-Cuban religions like Arará and Abakuá. Through mutual colleague Jorge Luis Zamora, the two were put in touch as Zanetti embarked on a visit to Cuba. Once on the island, the pair embarked on a collaboration that took Zanetti to Navarro’s hometown of Güines. Spending time with Navarro in this small town to the south of Havana, a space alive with the sound of authentic batá drums and Santería rites, Zanetti was able to immerse himself and observe. He learned directly from ceremonial percussionists and from Navarro himself, who had invented a complex technique that recreates the batá drum’s polyrhythms, timbre, and variations on guitar while maintaining a melodic line.

“I knew that composing with polyrhythms and polyphony at the same time would be a challenge as it required writing music in a new way to differentiate what notes belonged to the rhythm and what belonged to the melody,” says José Angel Navarro on the music he later taught Zanetti. “Very little has been written about the roots of this music. The ceremonies are secret, passed along through word-of-mouth. There are a lot of modifications on the songs depending on what village or region they are played in. I was lucky to be born in Güines, which was central to sugarcane farming in Cuba. There’s a large concentration of African-descended peoples who brought their traditions and adapted them —what is known as ‘syncretism’. As I perfected my technique of bringing these sacred polyrhythms to the guitar, the songs were approved by priests who recognized the songs of each Orisha and helped me tweak my versions as close as possible to the original songs. As I taught Walter [Zanetti], I told him to put any classical technique to the side.”

The result, after months of learning by imitation and supplementing the lessons with close-listens of key Cuban singer of Santería chants Lazaro Ros, is a stunning record that builds upon the work of Cuban master guitarists, vocalists, and priests of Santería’s rites and imbues them with new life. Kicked off with a lively 11-minute rendition of “Guaguanco, Conga, Colombia” from Navarro’s Miel, the record moves through the discographies of Navarro and Angulo, using the guitar to channel the high and low registers of batá drumming. Zanetti’s guitar invokes tender spiritual depths with soft strumming (“Borotiti”), somber plucking that almost emulates an angelic harp (“Ibu”), and lively, energetic playing that vibrates with unmistakable warmth (“Sumu Gaga”). Zanetti’s take on these sacred Afro-Cuban polyrhythms was recorded at an 11th-century Benedictine monastery in Ganna, a small town within the north Italian province of Varese.. While preparing for the undertaking, he offered a small prayer to Ochún, the Orisha of love and fertility. 

“When you enter the ancient monasteries of the Romanesque era, the echoes of Gregorian chant resurface and you perceive the roots of a profound spirituality that dates back to the dawn of Christianity. In the West, however, the profound meaning of the function of music within it has lost its original meaning: the spiritual dimension now has more of an individual than collective value. The music of Santeria —passed down orally— has a function linked to a complex context where music, singing, and dance contribute to reaching an emotional state where participants can get closer to a spiritual dimension. This centuries-old tradition is still very much alive in the Cuban people. To find myself in a monastery playing music inspired by the traditions of Cuban Santeria unites artistic expressions that address the transcendent.”

The power of Cantos Yoruba de Cuba reverberating off the walls of a monastery — Africa reaching The Caribbean and making its way to an Italian monastery — cannot be understated. Zanetti’s ability to translate the batá drum and the teachings of Navarro and Angulo into guitar, to bring forth these hidden teachings to a broader audience, is in and of itself an act of syncretism, a collision of&#38;nbsp; intention and location that combines Western musical teachings and brings them crashing into contact with Cuba’s esoteric traditions to create something truly transcendental.
(E.R. Pulgar, Cariño)


CREDITS


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		<title>ly006</title>
				
		<link>https://l-years.com/ly006-1</link>

		<pubDate>Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:54:45 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>light-years</dc:creator>

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light-years: ly006


Ludwig Wandinger - Is Peace Wild?


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An album of hypnagogic nocturnes that relentlessly searches for a sense of calm in the great unknown, 'Is Peace Wild?' is German producer, drummer and visual artist Ludwig Wandinger's upcoming release on light-years. He dreamt it up while unpacking the breakdown of a long relationship, working in hotel rooms during the downtime between a series of chaotic live shows. To help empty his mind, Wandinger developed a suite of soulful reflections that prioritize harmony over rhythm and clarity over trivial complexity - music that confronts the eternal duality of romance and tragedy. Almost beatless and consistently sublime, 'Is Peace Wild?' is punctuated by hypnotic lyrical contributions from multi-disciplinary artist, poet and activist Yves B. Golden and producer and vocalist Evita Manji, both of whom bless the album with indispensable friendship and familiarity. "It's almost as if they were telling me a good night story," says Wandinger.


With a series of albums and EPs under his belt already, Wandinger is a tireless solo artist and a prolific collaborator. He's released material for Orange Milk, Gin&#38;amp;Platonic, Creamcake, 3XL, and he worked alongside artists such as Evita Manji, Sara Persico, Grischa Lichtenberger and Brodinski. 'Is Peace Wild?' though emerges as Wandinger’s most personal work to date. The title track opens the album, and Golden's voice breathes softly over Wandinger's warm, lulling arpeggios. "Balloons and birds delight in the flow of air between rooms," she murmurs, floating her surreal phrases in a tranquil pool of pitch-skewed pads and chiming, music box synths. But this airiness doesn't last long: on the noisy, sombre 'Vien', Wandinger interrupts his elegiac, organ-like synths with metallic crashes and distorted, rasping bass, weaving twinkling, pensive notes into the spaces in-between. The oscillation between darkness and light is remarkably even-handed, capturing the aching sense of longing - or "Sehnsucht" - that's at the core of German Romanticism. And it's even more evident on 'Xhausted Form', one of the album's heaviest tracks. Unfolding initially with affecting, sacred chords, the serenity is challenged by eerie, dissonant crunches and unsettling feedback shrieks, yet the spark of romance, in all of its intricacy, never diminishes.


Meanwhile, the album's illusory qualities are fully dilated on 'Fire'. Manji's hypnotic freestyle was recorded in a single take as they were lying in bed on the verge of falling asleep, and provides a quiescent counterpoint to Wandinger's muted trance vibrations. "The world is on fire drowning in its own fluids," they slur into the abyss, vocalizing playfully while Wandinger freezes the sentiment in vanishing 4/4 thuds and dissociated processes. This makes the baroque 'Overlife' and the noisy 'Eternal Image' all the more dynamic. On the latter, Wandinger creates a noisy, apocalyptic atmosphere for Golden's sardonic words, cooling his euphoric synths with hissing white noise and burnished cybernetic textures. "They are afraid of loud noises," Golden mouthes. "Bodies like mine are made for turbulence."


Open-ended and tangled with emotional paradoxes, 'Is Peace Wild?' can be interpreted in many different ways. Wandinger's own serenity is personal, but laying himself bare, he provides listeners with a cracked mirror to consider their unique patchwork of conundrums.


CREDITS


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		<title>ly005</title>
				
		<link>https://l-years.com/ly005</link>

		<pubDate>Thu, 09 May 2024 15:18:14 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>light-years</dc:creator>

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light-years: ly005
Grand River and Abul Mogard - In uno spazio immenso
Order In uno spazio immensoWhen the world's chatter is hushed to a whisper and emptiness replaces clutter, time falls away completely, exposing a vast, open canvas for the imagination fill with reflection, contemplation and abstraction. On their first collaborative album, released via Caterina Barbieri's light-years label, Grand River and Abul Mogard gaze longingly into the abyss, capturing atemporality, splendour and tranquility with confident, impressionistic sonic strokes. Dynamic and poignant, 'In uno spazio immenso' balances on a knife-edge between booming, operatic grandeur and soft- focus simplicity, casting as much light on the subtle outlines and illusory rhythms as it does its dense, almost overpowering textures.

 Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and sound designer Aimée Portioli, aka Grand River, has been evolving her unique musical language since she released 'Crescente' on Donato Dozzy and Neel's Spazio Disponibile imprint in 2017. A trained linguist, she uses her instrumentation and advanced processes to challenge cultural perceptions, portraying emotions and moods rather than fixed, visual images. Abul Mogard meanwhile is just one of veteran Italian producer Guido Zen's many aliases, and over a series of acclaimed albums for labels like Ecstatic, Houndstooth and VCO, he's muddled fiction with stark reality, shaking kosmische synth fantasies into post- industrial ambience and blissful shoegaze memories. 
Working together, Portioli and Zen find unity in intensity, freezing their discrete concepts and techniques into a glacial emotional expanse. On opening track 'Dissolvi', they peer out hand-in- hand over a colossal, reverberant landscape, conducting booming basses, evaporating voices and brassy synthetic swells that pick out the formidable topography. Beatless but not without rhythm, the composition moves at its own pace, twisting time and form to suggest the duo's obliquely hypnagogic narrative. And with each action, there's inevitably a reaction: 'Frantumi di luce' is a hushed refraction that simmers with intrigue, decorating its subtle, flickering pulse and dazzling rays of thoughtful ambience, while 'Altrove, lontano' transports listeners into a different locale entirely, cloistering its meditative mood with angelic choral echoes and evocative strings. 
The album's most devastating track, 'Archi' is an apex of sorts, a collision of widescreen electroid oscillations and overdriven drones that careens into a grinding industrial beat, and 'Sulle barcane' is its serene inverse, a breathy exhalation fashioned from cryptic environmental recordings, static washes and weightless pads. But 'In uno spazio immenso' isn't a story about Portioli and Zen, exactly, it's an invitation to listen to an inner voice that's different for each listener. Space is whatever we want it to be, and how we decide to fill it is a choice that's dependent on the depth of the imagination.
CREDITS
	
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	<item>
		<title>ly004</title>
				
		<link>https://l-years.com/ly004</link>

		<pubDate>Tue, 26 Sep 2023 14:51:12 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>light-years</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://l-years.com/ly004</guid>

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light-years: ly004
Marta De Pascalis - Sky Flesh
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If there's one specific component that grounds 'Sky Flesh', it's focus. Italian musician and sound designer Marta De Pascalis flexed her technical muscle on 2020's 'Sonus Ruinae', layering various sounds and processes in an attempt to touch the sublime. In contrast, 'Sky Flesh' is a single thought, composed using just one instrument: the Yamaha CS-60. A slimmed-down sibling to the gargantuan CS-80 - the analog synthesizer used by Vangelis to create his iconic 'Blade Runner' score - the CS-60 was released in 1977, a few years before the MIDI protocol was introduced to help standardize production methods. MIDI would change the electronic music landscape completely, offering a level of control that De Pascalis consciously relinquishes, preferring to highlight expressiveness and timbre, elements more readily associated with acoustic instruments. The album arrives as much of the wider experimental scene busies itself with algorithmic composition and AI-assisted modeling; De Pascalis chooses to work instead like an organologist, harnessing the CS-60's mercurial magic to suggest deeper truths about our evolving relationship with machines.

Currently based in Berlin, De Pascalis grew up in Rome, where she was surrounded by atrophied ruins that piqued her interest in decay and memory. Over her last three albums, she used tape loops and advanced synthesizer techniques to create a unique sound world that's guided by her musical philosophy, rather than a specific aesthetic. As she's developed her technique and confidence, her music has become even more idiosyncratic, and at this stage in her career she's stripped her sound down to its core elements, focusing on emotion, narrative and mystery. Using timbres that recall a time when electronic music still waved towards the future, De Pascalis' melodic content is rooted in early and Renaissance music, almost cleaving it from history entirely. Fittingly, 'Sky Flesh' is released on acclaimed Italian composer Caterina Barbieri's burgeoning light-years label, the ideal platform for her labyrinthine, cosmic vignettes. 

De Pascalis introduces us to the album with a triptych that establishes her sonic landscape immediately. On 'voXCS60x', 'The Shapes We Buried' and 'Blue to Blue', she presents the CS-60 in all its malleable glory, running its serrated, ring-modulated oscillations through booming reverb and reducing them to vapors. Despite not working with MIDI sequencing, De Pascalis exerts a remarkable level of command, bending her compositions into abstract shapes without sacrificing their evocative earworms. It's an almost ritualistic process that centers a musician who's not only in dialog with technology but with the cosmos itself, channeling its puzzles through her machines. This soul-searching is most evident on 'Yueqin', a dreamily ornate, moonlit composition that breathes through filigree melodic flourishes and triumphant fanfares, signaling a distant romance in the heavens.

De Pascalis takes a brief detour on 'Commas Light' and 'Cut Off Horizon', investigating tonality in miniature and coaxing expression out of her delirious runs of notes with uncommon ease. It makes the conclusion of 'Làsciati' and 'Equal to no Weight' hit that much harder, the former a dissonant dance into psychedelia and the latter an almost ten-minute cloud of obscured harmony. With all traces of the CS-60's sound humbled by tides of noise, it's an apt finale, climaxing with suggestive echoes that pointedly disappear into silence. With 'Sky Flesh', De Pascalis doesn't freeze time, but expands its reach, offering a fresh perspective on cosmic music that's steeped in riddles and wonder.Written, produced and mixed by Marta De Pascalis&#38;nbsp; Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi&#38;nbsp; Photography by George NebieridzeDesign by Nicola Tirabasso


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	<item>
		<title>ly003</title>
				
		<link>https://l-years.com/ly003</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 29 May 2023 14:27:39 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>light-years</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://l-years.com/ly003</guid>

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light-years: ly003&#38;nbsp;

Caterina Barbieri - Myuthafoo


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Italian composer Caterina Barbieri has spent the best part of a decade breaking apart the rigid structures of electronic music, using advanced, idiosyncratic techniques to build bridges between academic experimental, dance and pop landscapes. Her breakthrough moment came in 2017 with the Important Records-released "Patterns of Consciousness", a confident fusion of analogue synthesis and algorithmic compositional methodology that defined her unique voice. And when she followed it with "Ecstatic Computation" on the legendary Editions Mego label in 2019, wide acclaim ensued, with critics praising its potent fusion of minimalism and trance-inducing synth experimentation. Pitchfork has described her music as "a mind-altering journey" and "a dreamachine for the ears".Since then Barbieri has worked hard to subvert expectations at every turn, offering an eccentric spin on the remix album with "Fantas Variations" - a selection of collaborations and reworks from friends and inspirations like Kali Malone, Jay Mitta, Evelyn Saylor and Kara-Lis Coverdale - and developing a modish articulation on last year's poetic and densely layered "Spirit Exit". Described by NPR as “deeply psychedelic and, by extension, subversive," the album was more than just a selection of tracks; it launched her own light-years label and arrived alongside an ambitious live experience that developed her philosophy in multiple dimensions, bringing in additional voices like Bendik Giske, Nkisi and Lyra Pramuk and bespoke visuals from Marcel Weber and Ruben Spini."Myuthafoo" was written at the same time as "Ecstatic Computation", which Barbieri regards as a sister album. Both albums are based on creative sequencing processes that playfully unravel Barbieri's deep-rooted interest in time, space, memory and emotion. And since she was set to re-release "Ecstatic Computation" on her own light-years imprint with an exclusive new track, it made sense to accompany that album with this intimately entangled set of unreleased recordings. At the time, Barbieri had been touring excessively and her process began to shift in response to that nomadic, interactive energy. Using the Orthogonal ER-101 modular sequencer, Barbieri manually programed patterns into the device and fed them into her arsenal of noise generators, trialling different combinations at each show.If an idea worked well in the live environment, she would put it to one side, letting longer pieces breathe and transform as they sprung to life and developed organically. It's a process she relates to her interest in cosmogony, the study of the origins of the universe; her music is rooted in the limitations of a small number of options that branch out into a much larger structure, eventually reaching towards an open-ended cosmos of possibility. From 'Math of You', it's clear that the sounds are grounded in a similar sonic philosophy; blipping synth sequences nudge alongside each other harmonically, disrupting trance's addicting euphoria with filigree polyrhythmic pulses. Like 'Fantas' before it, the track is focused around emotionally affecting repeating phrases, but a closer examination reveals hidden intricacies as these phrases flicker like illusions, dissolving and dissipating as they snake and weave.The album's title track is its most generous and most tender, blunting Barbieri's usually razor-sharp sequences into rubbery möbius strips that twist romantically, bending back on each other. It gazes at the stars from an atemporal vantage point, relying on synapse-popping psychedelic logic as well as established physics. 'Sufyosowirl' meanwhile is rigorous and rhythmic, as melodically charged as pop music and as soaring as Jean-Michel Jarre's lavish stadium electronics. Closing track 'Swirls of You' encases Barbieri's celestial sequences in gaseous vapors, allowing the music to ascend slowly and purposefully until it flickers and fades to nothing. Barbieri's music sounds as if it has a life of its own, endlessly expanding and transmuting until it's able to develop its own rules and gestures. "Myuthafoo" teases an ecosystem where technology and biology are intertwined, and where the past, present and future are part of the same essential narrative.
	
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	<item>
		<title>ly002</title>
				
		<link>https://l-years.com/ly002</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 29 May 2023 14:27:35 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>light-years</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://l-years.com/ly002</guid>

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light-years: ly002&#38;nbsp;

Caterina Barbieri - Ecstatic Computation Reissue&#38;nbsp;
Three years after the original release date of Caterina Barbieri’s career defining album Ecstatic Computation on Editions Mego, the Italian artist reissues the record on her newly found own label light-years. The re-issue features an unreleased track available as digital download as well as a beautifully reworked version of the original cover art.Ecstatic Computation revolves around the creative use of complex sequencing techniques and pattern-based operations to explore the artefacts of human perception and memory processes by ultimately inducing a sense of ecstasy and contemplation. Computation is turned from being a formal, automatic writing technique into a creative, psychedelic practice to generate temporal hallucinations. A state of trance and wonder where the perception of time is distorted and challenged.Equally nervous and ecstatic, the fast permutation of patterns can create a state where time stands still whilst simultaneously being in motion. Is this propulsive music moving forward or backward? As long as the perception of &#38;nbsp;the present is constantly enhanced and refreshed in an endless sense of loss, re-discovery and the search for self-orientation this question lies mute aside the thrilling and perplexing moment of the matter at hand.Ecstatic Computation reissue on light-years is now available for pre-order as LP (black and silver), CD and digital.


LIGHT YEAR REISSUE

	
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	<item>
		<title>ly001</title>
				
		<link>https://l-years.com/ly001</link>

		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Apr 2022 13:10:12 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>light-years</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://l-years.com/ly001</guid>

		<description>
	

light-years: ly001&#38;nbsp;

Caterina Barbieri - Spirit Exit

Caterina Barbieri’s ’Spirit Exit’ is now available on 2LP (Black and coloured vinyl versions), CD and digital.

ORDER SPIRIT EXIT&#38;nbsp;

“The musical vortexes of Caterina Barbieri rewire time and space. Listening to the Italian composer and modular synth virtuoso has felt like traveling at light-speed and slow-motion all at once since 2017’s breakthrough double-album Patterns Of Consciousness. 2019’s acclaimed Ecstatic Computation pushed even further with the lead single “Fantas”, where a haunting melody hurtling towards its supernova climax felt like witnessing the life and death of a burning star. Far beyond any new age trope or modern synth trend, her music stands alone in its ecstatic intensity and cataclysmic emotional impact. Marking the debut album on her new label light-years, Barbieri now delivers her most profound work yet&#38;nbsp; — a journey through inner-space as vast as a universe and as intimate as a heartbeat. The Spirit Exit opens and we fall in.

Spirit Exit is Caterina Barbieri’s time machine, primarily composed with a modular synth rig she thinks of more like a mechanical fortune teller. Whereas previous releases were constructed on lengthy tours, capturing only snapshots of continually evolving works, Spirit Exit represents the producer’s first album fully written and recorded in her home studio amidst Milan’s two-month pandemic lockdown in 2020. It was during this extended isolation she found inspiration from female philosophers, mystics and poets spread across time, but united in their strength at cultivating vast internal worlds. St. Teresa D’Avila’s foundational 16th century mystical text The Interior Castle, philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman theories and the metaphysical poetry of Emily Dickinson act as thematic anchors throughout Spirit Exit, imbuing a life and death gravity into the composer’s most perception-altering music to date.

More than any release before it, Spirit Exit crystallizes Barbieri’s densely layered, blindingly bright synth arrangements while introducing stunning new elements that feel as if they’ve always belonged. Strings and guitar flawlessly thread into the composer’s web of modular patches, while her revelatory singing voice often cuts right through them. Melodies remain Barbieri’s great passion and obsession — she thinks of them as knots she’s trying to untangle, existential metaphors formed through tensely spiraling arpeggios — and on Spirit Exit they grow as large as planets before cracking into atoms. Parts of one song can haunt another. The synth progression unraveling through “Knot Of Spirit” is reborn on “Broken Melody”, an explosive peak with vocals that flash like a lightning storm. The sweeping “At Your Gamut” perfects the producer’s dramatic, slow-burning openers, but in her first ever use of sampling, it later gets crushed, accelerated and unrecognizably transformed into the ghostly hook surging through “Terminal Clock” — an otherworldly sound rushing across what feels like the artist’s first track for a dancefloor.

Caterina Barbieri’s music has always transported listeners, its perpetual movement achieved through complexities that needn’t be solved, but simply felt. Spirit Exit articulates that endless ascension — destination unknown, resolution always just out of reach — with a newfound humanity. It’s the result of a one-of-a-kind artist deeply reflecting on what music means to them, only to return with an even greater understanding of what it can be. As the album closes on “The Landscape Listens” — a song that approaches death with all the gentle grace of Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” —&#38;nbsp; it brings to mind the full line of Emily Dickinson’s poem “There’s a certain slant of light”. “When it comes — the landscape listens / Shadows — hold their breath.” Spirit Exit is a special kind of seance, an album so otherworldly and inexplicably moving it leaves even its ghosts in a stunned silence.”

CREDITS
	&#60;img width="2000" height="2000" width_o="2000" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ead61291ba3dbc143157b6e99fce1a50eba8dba2c208a20731377c0cf81b3721/Spirit-Exit.jpg" data-mid="140040966" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ead61291ba3dbc143157b6e99fce1a50eba8dba2c208a20731377c0cf81b3721/Spirit-Exit.jpg" /&#62;
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	<item>
		<title>ly001s</title>
				
		<link>https://l-years.com/ly001s</link>

		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Jun 2021 09:47:54 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>light-years</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://l-years.com/ly001s</guid>

		<description>
	light-years: ly001s 


Knot of Spirit - Caterina Barbieri feat. Lyra Pramuk


Caterina Barbieri launches her new label platform light-years with the single release of “Knot of Spirit” featuring vocals by American artist Lyra Pramuk. The track functions like a statement of intent from the Italian composer and musician as she gestures towards the kind of enchanted and transmutational music-worlds that she will welcome onto the light-years label.

With a title evoking a metaphysical state of unresolved tension and enigma, “Knot of Spirit” blends synth and vocals into a sonic vertigo which oscillates alluringly between the mystical and the hallucinatory. Barbieri’s whirling, haunting synth patterns interweave with Pramuk’s other-worldly vocals into mirages of transcendence: time accelerates and decelerates in a trancelike spiral that erases any distinction between the inner and the outer worlds.

Barbieri pairs the single with a surreal oil painting by Russian artist Dasha Kuznetsova. The artwork seems to emanate from that same subconscious underworld of spontaneous and unmediated emotionality which Barbieri can uniquely conjure at the heights of her musical powers. This is a work of catharsis, a dark descent into the ineffable with an explosive, poignant and uncontrolled finale, “Knot of Spirit” is an erratic journey of impassioned endurance with the handbrakes off. 


LISTEN


Oil Painting by Dasha Kuznetsova
Hand embroidery lettering by TulpessVideo animation by Davide Busnelli. 

&#38;nbsp;


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