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Onemind Presents Onemind

BARKER - UTILITY LP

Ostgut Ton

  • £30.76

Format: 2LP+DL
Catalogue No.: OSTGUTLP32
Barcode: 4250101409264
Release Date: 22 Dec 2023
Genre: Techno/House

Limited 2023 BioVinyl repress which provides an ecological alternative to the conventional vinyl record with strictly no sound or visual compromises.

Pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance as a rave metaphor fits the music of Sam Barker. The Berghain resident and Leisure System co-founder has spent the last few years exploring the euphoric potential of altering key variables in dance music formulas.

This was especially true on his 2018 Ostgut Ton debut EP Debiasing, which was flush with unconventional rhythmic chord stabs, melody and percussion but devoid of kickdrums. What seemed like an experimental exercise on paper was in reality equally geared towards the club: tracks that worked for the floor but resisted the genre categorizations that kick drums often provide. This has come to define Barker’s sound.

Accordingly, Utility is a playful but non-ironic musical approach to a whole spectrum of utilitarian and transhumanist ideas: from models for quantifying pleasure and “gradients of bliss” to abolishing suffering for sentient beings (not just people) through the ethical use of drugs and nanotechnology. Over nine tracks, Barker’s vision ebbs and flows through waves of deeply psychedelic musical vignettes; free-floating and futuristic melodies and rhythms as targeted brain stimulation. The sound draws heavily on modular synthesis, as well as self-built mechanical instruments and plate reverbs to create atmospheres that are at once alien and emotionally recognizable, functional and utopian.

Tracklisting
A1 Barker Paradise Engineering 00:04:08
A2 Barker Posmean 00:03:54
A3 Barker Experience Machines 00:03:39
B1 Barker Gradients Of Bliss 00:05:28
B2 Barker Hedonic Treadmill 00:04:09
C1 Barker Models Of Wellbeing 00:06:03
C2 Barker Utility 00:04:30
D1 Barker Wireheading 00:02:19
D2 Barker Die-Hards Of The Darwinian Order 00:09:07

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