Bleep

Following up a Bleep album of the year is not an easy feat. Bleep’s top album of 2019 was Ecstatic Computation, a mind-altering journey from Italian artist Caterina Barbieri. Exactly one year after its release, Milan’s two-month lockdown would see Barbieri create her next work completely in her home studio. The heightened challenges posed by immobility in isolation, however, leave no traces of restlessness on her fourth full-length LP. Rather, Spirit Exit shatters the four walls of the studio completely, taking listeners into new, uncharted territory.

Full of wonder and wide-eyed exploration, Spirit Exit contains multitudes. It flips quantum states, vast echoes of ambience transmuting into pendulums of shredding synths in seconds. Though often reckoning with death, the album recognises sound as a living organism, one that can’t help but expand its reverberant chest as it breathes, can’t help but transform irreversibly as it builds and grows throughout dense soundscapes, can’t help but resurface its own musical memories, fallible in their intense emotional outpourings.

Barbieri likens her melodies to knots, which untangle and retie themselves as the album unfurls. The dazzling strings and pulses of ‘At Your Gamut’ are eviscerated on ‘Terminal Clock’, whose own swinging scythe of a synth is reborn with elegance on ‘The Landscape Listens’. Pleading vocals are plunged underwater in ‘Canticle of Cryo’, head bobbing and gasping for air in a modular synth ocean. ‘Knot of Spirit (Synth Version)’ suspends the listener between two extremes, its sonic threads loosening at breakneck pace, its arpeggiated hockets crawling like ivy up the walls of mysterious ruins.

On Spirit Exit, Caterina Barbieri seeks to unravel the unknowable nature of the otherworld, capturing an incredible glimpse of it from her unparalleled imagination.