Tone Glow 185: Barker
An interview with the Berlin-based producer about mechanical instrumentation, collaboration, and his new LP 'Stochastic Drift'
Barker
Barker, a.k.a. Sam Barker, is a Berlin-based electronic music producer. He first dug into the stuff in the UK, hauling synthesizers to nightclubs and improvising alongside other musicians. As his interest in the style grew, he began working as a booking agent, moved to Germany, and co-founded Leisure System, a storied dance-music label that has hosted names such as Dopplereffekt, JoeFarr, and EPROM. Alongside Andi Baumecker, he formed Barker & Baumecker, a duo whose work circles the more left-field corners of techno, dub techno, and dubstep without abandoning the dancefloor.
In 2018, after nearly a decade of production, Barker released Debiasing, an exploration of dance-music idioms with the kick drum left out; he proceeded to follow it up with his first solo LP, the remarkable Utility. From there, he flipped that idea its head with Unfixed, which dug into “the variability and sonic possibilities of a kick-drum.” On April 4th, he will release Stochastic Drift, an LP that takes his electronic-music explorations further afield. Michael McKinney spoke with Barker—who was surrounded by a small warehouse’s worth of synthesizers, and percussion instruments—over Zoom on March 6, 2025 to discuss his relationship to Berlin nightlife, exploring mechanical instrumentation, long-form jam sessions, and more.
Michael McKinney: How are you?
Barker: Good. I had an interview with Groove Magazin in the morning, and then this afternoon I spoke with Sebastian Mullaert and Speedy J, talking about this jam thing that’s coming up. So it’s been a virtual-social day, which is fine. How are you?
I’m all right. I’m getting my day going, relatively speaking.
You’re in the States somewhere?
Yeah—I’m in Minnesota. I appreciate you making the time [to speak with me]; I’m sure there’s a lot of press going on with the incoming record.
There is. I just came across Tone Glow recently, and I’ve been dipping into some of the articles. I like the list of people that you speak to; it’s pretty interesting. It’s a nice bunch of people to join as a guest, so I appreciate you asking.
Let’s roll the clock back, if you don’t mind. What’s some of the first art you remember connecting with?
Let me see. It would depend on how broadly you use the term “art,” but from a really early age, the pleasure of creative acts was all around. I had a family that valued music; my mom played various instruments and taught guitar. We would always be going to concerts or going to see theater shows. It would be hard to pick out a landmark to signify the “first” experience.
In terms of feeling the potential of music, it would be sitting in on my brother’s band rehearsals. I was, like, twelve years old. I watched them work out new songs together. They were a mid-’90s grunge-y [band]: power chords and riffs and switching the distortion pedal on and off—you get the picture. But there was just something about this chemistry of people making music together; this team effort to make sound happen felt like the most exciting thing that I’d experienced to that point. That was “art” (laughs) to some degree. Not conceptual in any way, but there’s great power in it. If I had endless time, I could explore that question (laughs), but that would be the experience that comes to mind as a trigger for taking this seriously.
Did you play anything at the time?
I did; I played various instruments. It was also a consequence of—we couldn’t play computer games, and we didn’t have TVs in our room. It was all good, wholesome education stuff: painting, pen-and-paper games, and reading books. There wasn’t a total trust (laughs) of new inventions. As a result, playing instruments was a pastime. I learned quite a lot of instruments to a mediocre level, or to a level that was enough for me to have fun and play with other people. I wasn’t too much of a virtuoso on anything in particular. I started playing in some bands myself—anybody I knew that played an instrument, we’d be like, “Let’s make a band! What kind of music are we gonna play?” I wasn’t taking it seriously as a career path, but it wasn’t such an absurd idea—at that point in the ’90s—that you could make a career from it. Technology was getting more accessible and professional sounding. There was this shift to digital synthesis, and everyone was getting rid of analog stuff. Tracks made in people’s bedrooms would get on Top of the Pops. It was something you could dare to dream about at that point. But it was a little while (laughs) before I became a full-time producer.
I take it that, from the jump, you’re looking for that communal experience of music-making.
That’s definitely the bit that makes the most sense. To me, the independence of producing all of the parts for yourself, and the control that you have, is a trade-off with the fun times you have making music with friends, people you admire, and people you can learn from. I find that things work much better when I have somebody to field ideas to. Tossing ideas around with someone else sidesteps a lot of the problems with my internal process, my relationship with what I’m doing and how it relates to what I’m presenting. You’re only half responsible in a duo, you know? (laughs).
I get it. I started out playing music as a solo process, and I eventually made my way towards playing in jazz groups—I found that to be so much more rewarding because of that conversation. You’re subsuming yourself a little bit.
Absolutely. And I think you can take different roles in a collaboration. Not everybody’s comfortable in the spotlight. I think I match quite well with people who are comfortable there; I’m happiest when I’m playing a supportive role—doing the rhythm section, if you will. You can also negate your personal weaknesses in different areas through introducing other people to do things you’re not totally comfortable with.
Talk to me about your relationship to improvisation. I think about Speedy J’s STOOR Lab hardware jams; on your latest record, I hear some stuff that feels close to nu-jazz. What is your relationship to improvisation in your work?
As I said, I like to collaborate with people, and improvising is an opportunity to have short-form—temporary—collaborations with people, so there’s this potential to try things out and have really diverse influences involved. I ran a night in Brighton called “Instrumentality.” This was a weekly live-music event on the seafront in Brighton; once a month, we had an improvisation night. We didn’t have a synchronization system: there would be someone with electronics, someone with an instrument—a guitar, a trumpet, a mic and a looping pedal, a sitar. We had all kinds of different setups. We would play ’til we closed the doors, and then we’d lock the doors and play ’til the morning. It was a nice way to meet people and connect people when I was in Brighton, and there was quite a diverse selection of musicians. It wasn’t a club; we didn’t need to be serving any purpose other than just having fun. People could come watch if they wanted. That was bootcamp for getting into improvisation.
When was this?
2001-2006. There was a scene for improvisation in Brighton; there was another event called “Safe House,” which was more in the free-jazz direction. There were a lot more jazz instruments and fewer electronics. I’d go along with a synth and join in. The way that worked was: everyone in the audience was a musician, more or less. It was a real in-group event. The organizer would choose two to four people at random, and they’d have a few minutes to get ready—or plug in, in my case—and then [they’d] jam for anywhere between five and twenty minutes. That would be the track, and people would applaud, and then the next group would get selected. This was a really cool bunch of folks: jazz-heads and very experimental-minded people. They’d do, say, spoken-word stuff over someone making a drone on a saxophone: all these completely new proposals for music styles, one after the other.
It’s quite different from these jams that I’ve been getting involved with recently. The STOOR thing coming up is with Circle of Live. I’ve played with [Circle of Live co-founder] Sebastian [Mullaert] before in the Botanical Gardens in Berlin. That was with Erika, Wayne Snow, Sebastian, and myself. The first thing happened in the pandemic with Mike [Bierbach, a.k.a.] Rødhåd and JakoJako. The three of us played a socially distanced event. One of the rules was that we couldn’t make people dance. (laughs). We did our best to stay away from that kind of signaling. It’s become a bit of a thing, I think. There’s the WSNWG events; there’s going to be another one this year following the Berghain event they did last year. I played at that, but it wasn’t announced, because I’d played the month before, and they didn’t want to have me playing live two months in a row.
It was so much gear: I’d never seen so much gear on one table. Right in the middle of the dancefloor, there was this big pile—several studios facing outwards so people could walk around and see what was going on. It was, hands down, the most exciting Berghain night I’ve been to, and I’ve been to quite a few. It really felt like something new was happening.
It doesn’t sound all that different from what you’re describing with “Instrumentality,” though.
Well, there’s a purpose to it other than curiosity and sonic research. Particularly, the ones happening in clubs with an audience that wants to dance—this is fairly new. There’s been scenes in the past with elements of this approach, but it feels like things are coalescing at the moment with access to technology and materials for learning it. There was a time where, even if you had the manual for something, you couldn’t look it up online. It was terribly translated Japanese; it was a whole thing: “All this Japanese stuff is great, but you need a translator to understand the manual.” These days, you can just plug some terms into YouTube, watch 15 minutes, and understand. It’s never been easier for people to get involved with these kinds of things. I think it’s a good time for something like this to happen.
Did your interest in this sort of experimentation happen simultaneous to production, or did one come first?
My first intention with music production was to be able to record the bands I was playing in. I went to a school with a little broom-cupboard studio thing, and I heard that you can record your guitar and stuff into a computer. I got myself involved with those intentions, but once you learn what you can do with this technology, you realize there’s plenty more interesting things besides recording a guitar. In a great piece of luck, the music teacher there had a PRO-1 synthesizer; he taught a music technology course, and they had this synthesis part of it that he used to buy a synthesizer. So I had this PRO-1 to play with—that was amazing. That’s the point I fell in love with analog synths (laughs).
So it was a hardware thing first.
There weren’t any alternatives, basically. This was ’96. I didn’t know of any soft synths—I think there was a free one that came with FutureMusic at some point, and that was my first time trying software. But computers, in that time—it was like a Pentium II with hard-drives measured in megabytes. It was obvious that these things sounded way better. That’s not getting into the analog-digital debate, but at the time, the technology for software synthesis was in its infancy, and it wasn’t very impressive. The sound cards that we had in this studio were pretty poor, too. It was also stuff that people were getting rid of: synths that are now vintage collectors’ items you could pick up for a few hundred [pounds], or even less, in the back of a newspaper. All of these references are making me feel really old (laughs).
At what point did you realize you were taking this seriously as a craft?
The decision came as I was finishing school. I didn’t have access to a studio anymore, and the option, as I saw it, was: I have to live at home, work like crazy, and get the stuff I needed—my own computer, sound card, and speakers—and go from there. I suppose I wasn’t really thinking about anything else (laughs). The panic of realizing I wouldn’t have access to a studio anymore once I finished school was the moment that that happened.
I was doing parties, working as a booking agent, and running a label alongside making music since that time. It wasn’t really until 2017 that I jumped into it full-time. But I’ve always been involved in some part of the production line, and I’m happy that I’ve had, more or less, all of the experiences of the people I’m working with now: label, management, booking agents, promoters. It gives you a degree of empathy for everybody’s position (laughs). Because I think I have, probably, the best position among those career paths.
It helps, if nothing else, to understand the way capital moves through it, and to see the way it works as a business.
That helps, yeah. I’m really happy to not have to think about doing an Excel for a show or getting emergency calls on the weekend because volcanoes are erupting in Iceland and all the flights are grounded. I don’t miss a lot of the dramas that being a booking agent brought me.
When you are starting to produce, and once you get into your earlier official releases, are you understanding your music as being of a specific tradition or lineage?
I suppose not consciously, but I’m definitely filtering my influences and translating that into some sort of output. I think that’s a natural process, and it’s interesting to hear where somebody’s coming from. At the same time, the music that really knocks me off my feet is stuff that I can’t figure out: I don’t know where the idea comes from. You can always trace things back, but I like the pursuit of innovation in music. There’s a school of production that tries to perfect some model—to make the most refined version of a set of parameters—and that’s appealing to a certain degree, but I’m much more interested in the R&D end of the sound spectrum. I’m interested in playing with what’s possible: using new tools to explore new sensations that we can experience with sound.
You know this as well as anybody—with some releases [such as 2019’s Utility], you went deep down specific rabbit holes: “What happens if we take the kick out?” That, to me, specific of an exploration almost sounds like that first idea: “How far can I refine this idea?” But it’s possible that these intertwine in some way.
I would say it was asking: “How far can you push the definition of this model before it becomes something else?” I wouldn’t see it as a process of refinement; I’d see it as testing the boundaries of the definition. Releasing it on a techno label, and having the associations with Berghain and Ostgut [Ton], gave it the techno stamp of authenticity which made it unquestionably of this model. I don’t think it would have had the same effect if it were released somewhere else, or if it were placed in a different context. If it were on an ambient label, it would have been received as an uptempo ambient record.
I think certain rules in dance music are useful, and I think it’s fun to adopt conventions and play around with them. But I think [the fact that] it’s seen as a contribution to the techno is partly circumstantial. Not to say I didn’t have in mind how these tracks would be contextualized in a DJ set. Debiasing (2018) was a more sincere effort at making dance tracks with those restrictions. It’s interesting how context comes into play with people’s perceptions of things.
What is your relationship to techno as a collection of histories?
It probably starts with people like Surgeon and British Murder Boys: this Birmingham scene. There was some hardtech crossover with the breakcore scene—I wasn’t really making breakcore, but it was one of the microgenres that were mingling in Brighton at the time; it was having a good moment then, and a few of my friends were into it. But with the party scene in the UK—going to a club was, at maximum, a three or four-hour experience. This long-form presentation of techno—I didn’t really experience it properly until I got to Berlin. It was quite a shock at first: dropping 50 BPM and going from this extreme [and] maximalist approach in Brighton to this whole different approach, where people were refining. Minimal was huge at the time; it seemed like with each new release, people were asking, “What more can we take away from this? How can we strip this down even more?”
It was very different from what I was used to, but I got quite into it quite quickly. It was refreshing to feel this sense of unhurried hedonism where you can just forget about everything. You don’t have to go home if this place closes—there’s another place you can go to. It was quite a different attitude. Also, people talked about parties differently: in the UK, it was about how many pints you drank, or how much you consumed of something. In Berlin, people measure their parties by how long they were there, or by how many different parties they went to in one evening. It was different music with different intentions behind them serving a different function. It felt less pressurized and much more sane, somehow. People talk about crazy Berlin parties, but people were much more sober than any UK or American [party] (laughs). People pace themselves.
Did you find your work congruous with those sensibilities? Did they inform your work in any way?
Yeah. Making music for a DJ to play in a club was something I’d never considered. I thought it was a fun challenge, and I made some efforts, and I realized I didn’t really know how it worked (laughs). That kind of gave me something to pay attention to when I was partying; I could call it research and see all these DJs without feeling guilty about it. At some point I met Andi Baumecker—he worked as the booker at Berghain and Panorama Bar, and we booked a show together with Autechre. Andi was central to me getting involved with Berghain: he took me under his wing a little bit, and, alongside Ned Beckett, who I worked for as a booking agent at Littlebig [Music] Agency, we started Leisure System.
Then Andi and I got asked to do a remix. Andi was getting curious about music production—he’d always been a DJ, but he was getting curious about production stuff. He asked me about doing it together—“You can show me how to record stuff”—and he’s an encyclopedia of dance-music knowledge, so I gained one of the best mentors, as a DJ, that you could ask for. It was a collaboration where we both had stuff to learn from each other; we both had our expertise, and we didn’t have too much crossover at first. Over time, we shared enough that we understood the whole thing a bit better. Andi was a great teacher.
I’d imagine coming at it without a ton of overlap would allow you to grow together in really unexpected and generative ways.
We had a big common interest in UK IDM and post-dubstep kind of stuff. He had a big soft spot for these kinds of sounds. But he’s a massive pop fan as well. We would always start a studio session by listening to music for half an hour. Sometimes he would play stuff that was just gratuitous cheese. But it’s good! If Andi’s playing it, there’s something of value in it. There’s always a reason he’s excited about something.
I want to be respectful of your time, so to jump way ahead: you said that you made your incoming record amidst “lots of changes and disruptions in your life.” Would you be comfortable elaborating on what those are?
Yeah. There’s the obvious circumstantial changes that everybody was experiencing, and I think everybody has their personal version of those stories. For me, it was: the year of touring that was lined up to support the album [Utility] getting incrementally cancelled, and then the label [Ostgut Ton] going on hold. I changed my whole approach to accommodate the new performance paradigm that was emerging with socially distanced events. Later, the agency stopped; I changed booking agents. I lost US agents. Everything that, at the start of 2020, felt like it was made of stone… it was quite remarkable how the rug could be pulled from everything in such an all-encompassing way. This made it quite hard to engage in a rule-based or goal-based approach because it seemed like every goal was changing from one week to the next. It was a very (laughs) disruptive time. I had existential fears about whether this was feasible in the future, even. I filled out paperwork for the job center, listing out all my experiences and skills and stuff like that. I was thinking (laughs), “I’m useless—everything I’ve done my whole life is so specialized. I can’t imagine doing anything else.” It was a scary time. It felt at times, like, “Should I pick a sensible career, re-study, and go that direction?”
I’m glad I didn’t, and a few months after the end of the last lockdown, things were coming back to life, and clubs were re-opening. The damage was severe, but it wasn’t hopeless. It opened up some really interesting possibilities as well: Berghain turned into a gallery for eight months or so, and they did an exhibition there with 100 artists. I put a mechanical piano in one of the toilets; it was playing an attempt at harmonic serialism, eight hours a day, seven days a week. That was not what I expected to be doing in the Berghain toilets. Some interesting event concepts popped up—some of my favorite events happened in that time because they forced people to get a bit creative with how they do things.
There was a day party called “Paradise Down by the Lake” in Belgium. You could be in groups of eight, and that was the limit. They made this concept where they had a stage that was around the edge of a lake, and they put all these miniature rafts on the lake. You’d buy a ticket for you and seven friends, and you’d get your own little raft. The bar would sell in bulk, so you’d buy beer and wine, and you’d have a cooler on the boat and some paddles. You’d float around this lake while people were performing on a stage. The whole lake was surrounded by a nice soundsystem, so anywhere you went, you could hear the sound. You would never naturally end up on a party concept like that, but it was so cool. As the day went on, people did their exploring and then they convened around the stage. People went between boats—I guess they shouldn’t have done that, but it became a bit more social. Donato Dozzy played that, I remember.
When was this?
2021? 2022? I can check. I don’t know if they’re gonna ever do it again. They made all of these rafts—I guess they didn’t do it again.
You talked to me about that exhibition work, and I know you’ve talked about working with mechanical instruments. When you’re doing that sort of work, are you tapping into any other compositional modes as compared to your studio approaches?
Definitely. It’s an opportunity to explore rule-based and generative approaches, and to present a concept rather than giving aesthetics the front seat. I still like things to be aesthetically pleasing, but your decisions can’t be whimsical in this framework. I like having to justify decisions, and I like having clarity on what’s good and bad, or right and wrong, on a subject. When I’m not, I find that I can too easily see all the different possibilities. I’m too diplomatic to choose a preference (laughs). There’s a lot of potential options that could be explored! Without a goal in mind for what you’re trying to say, it can stall you because you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve.
I’d imagine exhibition work gives you a pretty clear line: here’s the literal architectural needs of the space; here’s the sonic needs.
I think space, in whatever scenario, is always important. The acoustic characteristics of a space define what it’s going to enhance and what it’s going to be unflattering to. So that’s always a consideration. The audience is always a consideration. But it’s a different type of satisfaction, and a different process. I talked about doing something with serialism—I kind of don’t like to listen to serial music, but I like the philosophical idea of treating all the notes equally.
There’s a few people who have attempted some tonal serialism, or harmonic serialism, to adhere to this philosophical value of equality, but to make it somehow harmonious at the same time. This is something I’m curious about: how far you can push this uncompromising approach to equality within a framework of harmony which is all about biases and “right” and “wrong” notes, and so on. I don’t want to believe that harmony and equality are incompatible desires, but I’m not satisfied with the level of success that people have had with that.
That was the intention with the piano installation. It was a monophonic mechanical piano: there was a rail with a moving carriage that had solenoids that would play the keys. It would generate sequences based on tone rows that would play every note on the piano—each note at the same length, the same strength, and the same duration. There was a certain choreography where it would act more or less like a pendulum; the last notes were at the middle octave. As the frequencies got closer together, the relationship between the notes in the sequence would become more and more apparent. So, as it starts, the notes are on either end of the keyboard; you can’t get a sense that these are part of the same family or mode. It sounds unrelated. As the sequence goes closer to the center, the logic of the note sequence, and its harmony, start to emerge. These are very different things to be thinking about compared to house-music problems (laughs).
You’re describing this interest in serialism as a strategy—on one hand, it sounds like it’s working on a philosophical level, and on the other, it sounds like an interest as a structural challenge.
Something has to fulfil both criteria. I’m not selfless enough to do things I don’t enjoy (laughter). I find myself asking quite frequently, “What would it sound like to do [this],” or “Wouldn’t it be fun to do [that]?” I’m floating ideas to myself, and some live and some die. Some you pursue like crazy because you’re curious about the result. The curiosity about the end result—how successful you can be with this ethical approach to the treatment of tones—how fun can you make it? That’s my idea of a fun and worthwhile challenge (laughs). At the same time, I wouldn’t want people to need to understand the works of Schoenberg to appreciate what I’m doing. I don’t want it to be necessary for you to understand these experiments if you want to appreciate them.
It’s still body music, at the end of the day.
Yeah. I think I’m still playing with aesthetics and with how sound connects with people. I want to avoid a situation where you have to read the script on the wall before you even have a chance of understanding or appreciating what’s going on. What I enjoy about going to see things [in museums] is reading up afterwards—having the experience first, without preconceptions, and being able to explore with as little context as possible. Afterwards, I’ll see what it was about if I’m interested enough. If it was an experience that moved me, I’ll want to dive in. But I have an aesthetic gatekeeper (laughs)—that’s my preference.
On a similar note, would you say your latest record [2025’s Stochastic Drift] has a similar kind of aesthetic or philosophical throughline, or is it doing something else?
The music was made over a five-year period—since the last record. Along the way, I got a lot of new tools and a lot of new ideas—new experiences and approaches. It was all changing so quickly that I felt like with every new thing I was getting further away from the idea I started with at the start of the pandemic: “We’re going to be indoors for a bit; it’s time to follow up on the last record.” That was me getting on with things. That plan was paused when the label went on hold, and I did the exhibition instead. I started getting deeper into mechanical instruments and involving them in new music.
By the time we were assembling the record, there was a really broad range of stuff that [Smalltown Supersound manager] Joakim [Haugland] and [Ostgun Ton head] Alex Samuels were confident in. It wasn’t possible to link all the ideas for the individual tracks in any sensible way. The most honest way to describe it is as a chronology, I guess. The tracks are, more or less, in the order they were made in. That was the order that we settled on in the end because it gave a sense of the journey over the years. It’s a diary of my past five years. Individual tracks had their own ideas when they were being made, particularly at the start, but it’s not that type of record this time (laughs). There’s no definitive text that influenced what I was doing.
Honestly, it seems like that might be a bit freeing, especially after a bunch of records where people ask, “What’s the idea?” Is that fair, or am I editorializing?
That’s fair, yes. I like music to have a backstory or some depth that you can dig into, so it was a bit of a struggle at first when Joakim and Alex selected these tracks from across the whole time period—I had to accept their argument that it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to present things with a grand narrative. The tracks work together, so you need to just trust it (laughs).
You don’t need a superstructure.
It’s an honest proposal: this is what I’ve been interested in for the past five years. The “stochastic drift,” or the idea that the rules start dissolving at some point during the flow of the record, was more or less an observation from looking at it as a whole, putting it in order, and seeing there is a trend-line in the production, sound, and aesthetic. So—that’s it.
If we treat the record as a timeline, there seems to be this shifting interest—abstracted dance music at the start, beatless work and live or mechanized instrumentation at the end, and a slow shift from one to the other. Does that track with your production timeline?
Pretty much. The earlier tracks were made to be played at some point; they were made with some kind of eye towards functionality. As the record goes on, it’s less of a concern. The structures get a bit looser. This mechanical-acoustic influence developed from the installation work, actually—I met a very gifted musical-instrument builder named Kay Sievers. Together, we made the piano mechanics. He does the circuitry and the software for the boards—I’m borrowing a few of his instruments (points behind a synthesizer, towards a small tower of drums and cymbals). There’s a mechanical drum kit over there, and (turns camera) there’s a mechanical glockenspiel.
This collaboration with Kay has led to some nice ideas: we did an exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie with eight mechanical-acoustic violas. They’re very abstract—black boxes with a single string. The piano exhibition was called “Attune.” That turned into a friendship with Kay, and we’ve done a few other projects together. He’s also helped with a collaboration I’m doing with Bendik Giske at the moment. He’s built a system of sensors that sit on the keys [of Giske’s saxophone]. They give me 16 bits of rhythmic information from his valves that get turned into harmonic MIDI information that I can use for my synthesis stuff. All of the rhythms are driven by Bendik’s sax playing.
Do you feel you’re making dance music at this point? Does that label matter to you?
It’s something that I’m interested in, in the live context at the moment, but it’s not something I’m tremendously motivated to sit at home and produce. I’ve done a lot of it in the past, and there’s so many other functions and purposes that you can apply music to. It’s always going to be there, and I think there’s still stuff to explore in that realm, but I’m feeling much more satisfaction from doing different types of work at the moment: thinking about different problems than how to make people dance (laughs). That’s the fundamental necessity of the practice; it feels good to be released from this very strict, functional requirement. So, yeah: I’m gonna see where it goes. The album with Bendik, if all goes to plan, will be [out] later in the year. It’s going at a decent pace [and] in an exciting direction.
Talk to me about surprises—about getting caught off guard by your own work. How does your own work surprise you?
The first thing that came to mind is probably working with Bendik. We have all of the timing information coming from his performance, so there’s not a rigid grid—he pushes and pulls with the tempo, and it’s not a perfect[ly] linear grid that the events are aligning upon. But these are electronic sounds! So it’s a strange and interesting organization of events that’s somehow really unfamiliar, even if I use completely familiar sounds. If I use a piano and a glockenspiel to match the saxophone, it has this uncanny synchronization to the instrumentation, but it’s still a bit sloppy because it’s a human-driven process. I feel like I’m just starting to get into, I suppose, the effect of timing and micro-timing as a parameter that is somehow tickling to my ears. This, really, was a consequence that I had no idea I would discover: there’s a strange curiosity about electronic sounds arranged with human timing.
You’re making your J Dilla record.
I need to read that—Dilla Time. I’ve always loved the Dilla approach. It’s probably a bit more intentional [than this]. He’s trying to keep his timing steady, [but] I was really encouraging [Bendik] not to worry about the drift in tempo. I was like, “I love it when you speed up when you’re playing something exciting, and how you slow down a bit before going into another section.” It’s completely impossible stuff to do as a producer of music where the main rule is: you put it on a grid. You can add shuffle and that’s it. Otherwise, we want linear and regular systems, so that things are easy to mix. It’s really just for the convenience of DJs that we do that, but it’s an essential rule of dance music. So, here, we’re playing with that a little bit. A few tracks we did have the instrumentation of more conventional dance music, and a four-four kick drum, but they’re weird—particularly the timing I talked about. It’s an unusual aesthetic, and I’m very curious what people will make of it.
This is something I like to ask people near the end of each interview I run. What’s something you recently came to learn about yourself?
About myself?
Yep.
Hm. That’s another good question that probably takes a minute to think about. I suppose the most significant lesson I’ve learned recently is that you don’t get extra points for doing everything yourself. It’s great to work with other people. This might not seem like something I recently learned, but for years, I was going through the process of learning how to build circuit boards, and stuff to do with the mechanical project, because I didn’t want to ask other people to do it for me. Learning the thing was part of the interest in what I was doing. But I was starting from square one, and had a lot of basics to learn, so progress was quite slow. After meeting Kay and getting to work on the “Attune” piano installation, we had everything ready in about 6 weeks. Both of us were doing exactly what we were best at and nothing more.
Working at that installation at Berghain didn’t feel natural to me. [I was used to] collaborating with other people by being in a studio together and doing the same thing. Here, we were each doing completely different tasks: I was building the composition system in Max MSP, and building the rail and the hardware. Kay was building the circuit boards, designing the software, printing and building it, and soldering it. It was good for me to learn that you don’t have to do everything yourself. It’s not just more productive to collaborate with people who are experts in things—it’s just more fun to work on projects with other people. I think, in general, there’s a tendency to seek out singular-genius-type figures, and the illusion is they’re doing everything themselves. But everybody that has achieved anything is a team. From some level on, there’s always other people involved. In some cases, it’s 90% other people and the artist is making broad gestures and leaving them to it (laughs). Or giving a prompt, more or less.
When I heard that Damien Hirst had an art factory where he employed people to, basically, manufacture these butterfly pieces—people sticking butterfly wings on canvases—I was quite young when I discovered that, but I established this viewpoint that there was something fraudulent about having other people do work that you get to present as your own. I think that was the best lesson I’ve had in these past few years. It’s a good question—it should be asked of oneself more often, I think. It’s probably a decent thing to do a personal summary from time to time.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
I’ve been recording this album, as I said, with Bendik for the past two weeks. I’ve got all of his material recorded, and I’ve got all of my material recorded. This system generates MIDI information, so I have various stages of “undo” in the process. We’ve recorded a selection of different takes in an attempt to get Bendik’s performance and recording perfect, and alongside that, we’ve recorded MIDI information: the raw MIDI from the saxophone and the process MIDI, which has been through the system and has come out all harmonic and sensible. So it’s an interesting recording process, because I have all the relevant data from a take; now, I can isolate the parts and record them with more concentration than I can give in a performance situation. The system gives us some really interesting possibilities.
So there’s that, which I’m working on my parts for. There’s a few new proposals for the Discrete Ensemble—the installation at the Neue Nationalgalerie with the mechanical violas. There’s a few multi-player jam sessions that are coming up: one in March in Dublin for a night called Hardware and Paradiso, in Amsterdam, for STOOR Lab in April. There’s another event that will be announced at some point soon in September with the same kind of format. Those are the things I’m most looking forward to. I also have a collaborative live show with JakoJako that we’re working on, and another collaboration with a drummer from Switzerland called Arthur Hnatek. We haven’t really figured out what we’re going to do for that, but I think I’m going to do something with his rhythmic information. He’s a tech-savvy drummer; he uses triggers, MIDI, and so on. We’re discussing what we’re going to do; we have a couple of shows in May in Switzerland. I think those are the main things I’m looking forward to. I have some album shows, but it’s not an album that I can easily perform or present; it’s so many different processes and so many different ideas, so I’m not going to be presenting a Stochastic Drift show with any sort of fanfare, but I’m going to continue with my solo live set, which is an always-evolving thing. I like the way that that’s working at the moment. There’s probably one or two tracks from the album that I could imagine playing live, but I’m not going to attempt to recite the record on a stage at this point. I want to have time for all these other projects that are interesting.
Based on the range of things you’re describing, it feels like doing a live set where you perform the record wouldn’t be of interest anyways.
Yeah. You hear some records and you’re like, “I really need to hear this live.” But this is quite a studio record; it wasn’t possible to road-test it with audiences, and the previous records did benefit from being prototyped alongside being a DJ and trying things out. There wasn’t an obvious way to perform it—I put a good amount of thought into doing that, but nothing really made sense. You could take out the acoustic drums and the percussion stuff, but that’s only the second half of the record; you’d have that stuff sitting on the stage for half the show. Also, (gestures back towards the mechanical drum kit) these kinds of things are, I have to admit, less exciting to look at than a real drummer. The movement is a solenoid is going this far (opens and closes thumb and index finger) and past two or three meters, you can’t see what’s going on. They look great up close and on video, but they’re not optimized for a concert situation. Past a certain point, they look like static objects. You can liven things up with lights and so on, but they’re more fun here in the studio. I’m not going to do a specific album show for this.
Forgive the curiosity—are those splash or crash cymbals [on your drum machine]?
Yeah, they are cymbals (walks over to drum kit). There’s a ride (pointing) and a hi-hat there; you’ve got the toms, the snare, and the kick (taps cymbal). That’s my drum machine. It’s a product of an incredibly smart person who needs a constant—constant—challenge. He comes up with silly ideas like: “I wonder if I can make a mechanical double-bass,” or something. And a month later, he’s like: “I guess I can build a double bass!” He’s not found a challenge that has stumped him yet; it’s quite remarkable.
That interest in chasing systems as far as they can go doesn’t sound unfamiliar.
Yeah. He’s far more capable, though (laughs). He’s interesting: he doesn’t have any interest in making art or making music, so he builds it and he’s like, “What do you think of that?” And it’s like, “Yeah, that’s super damn cool. I’ve never seen such a cool instrument.” He’s like, “Great! Excellent. Want to use it?”
We should all be so lucky.
He’s a blessing from Heaven. There’s people who build stuff, but they build it for themselves to play with. He just builds things—he relishes a challenge with interesting problems, and I think he likes to do things with other people. He’s worked on his own enough thanks to the coding world. We probably had a similar feeling at the time that we met: we both needed to work together towards something.
Barker’s Stochastic Drift is out on April 4th via Smalltown Supersound.
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Great interview