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 2017s breakthrough doublealbum Patterns Of Consciousness. 2019s 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 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 Barbieris 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 producers first album fully written and recorded in her home studio amidst Milans 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 DAvilas foundational 16th century mystical text The Interior Castle, philosopher Rosi Braidottis posthuman theories and the metaphysical poetry of Emily Dickinson act as thematic anchors throughout Spirit Exit, imbuing a life and death gravity into the composers most perception-altering music to date.

More than any release before it, Spirit Exit crystallizes Barbieris densely layered, blindingly bright synth arrangements while introducing stunning new elements that feel as if theyve always belonged. Strings and guitar flawlessly thread into the composers web of modular patches, while her revelatory singing voice often cuts right through them. Melodies remain Barbieris great passion and obsession she thinks of them as knots shes 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 producers 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 artists first track for a dancefloor.

Caterina Barbieris music has always transported listeners, its perpetual movement achieved through complexities that neednt be solved, but simply felt. Spirit Exit articulates that endless ascension destination unknown, resolution always just out of reach with a newfound humanity. Its 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 Enos An Ending (Ascent) it brings to mind the full line of Emily Dickinsons poem Theres 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.