Barker made his modus operandi known on records like Debiasing and Utility, making music with a technoid pulse and drive while eliminating the obvious driver of rhythm: the beat. Having evolved alongside the post club and drumless trance scenes, Barker is part of a league of artists making leaps and bounds with vigorous, tactile synthesis, but on his second album, he continues to reject those genre structures and walk an abstract lane of his own. Stochastic Drift further plays with dance music’s infinite dimensions, tentatively reintroducing percussive qualities while throwing practically every number but four to the floor.
It’s almost like Barker had to examine rhythm at its core, stripped of drum machine flourishes and classic club timbres, before he could bring the beat back in its amorphous glory. On ‘Force of Habit’, he measures the torque of increasingly hard hitting slaps filtered into the revolving, deep plunges of dubwise synths. The quantised grid of the DAW is nowhere to be seen here, instead replaced by idiosyncratic kinetic movements, threaded in with emotive flashes and bells, and fluctuating choral textures.
Barker keeps this sophisticated stampede of subtly shifting rhythm going across the record, as sounds refract off of each other, constantly ‘Reframing’ themselves and stuttering into kaleidoscopic otherworlds. The percussive frequency shifts of ‘Difference and Repetition’ are bracketed by momentary rivers of silence amplifying the impact of each synthetic slam, while ‘Positive Disintegration’ slowly unfolds and shatters in a meditative atmosphere of muffled synth trickles and bass drips. Emerging from this hypnotic state are blossoming zither plucks, hurried shuffles, and reconfiguring hang drums discharging into a glitchy static.
Six years since his last LP, Barker reflects the world’s unpredictability in his everchanging productions while proving there are still untold new horizons to be charted in dance music.
