CATERINA BARBIERI - At Source

A “restless source that springs from within us,” to borrow Sartre's words, and one that must always be given a direction: this could be a starting point — a maxim from the celebrated French philosopher and writer — for grasping the essence of the spirit animating “At Source”, nomen omen of an album that for the first time brings together Caterina Barbieri and Norway's Bendik Giske. Two acclaimed composers who blend their respective alchemies of machines and wind instruments across four pieces recorded in the studio as mini-suites, moving between analogue synthesis and saxophone forays.

“At Source” sets out right away to bring together two seemingly distant creative processes. It's a work that “also reflects the naturalness of the collaboration,” as Barbieri puts it, adding: “A meeting at the source, spontaneous, graceful and unforced”.

Barbieri and Giske first met six years ago in Switzerland, at the Kunsthaus Glarus museum, both left fascinated by each other's performances. That first encounter was followed by a reworking of “Fantas” for Giske's “Fantas Variations”, which effectively brought the two even closer together. “Caterina's request came as confirmation of a convergence of ideas,” Giske explains.

“At Source” was born, to be precise, during an artist residency at Ica in Milan in 2021, at the invitation of Swiss artist and curator Jan Vorisek, and was later sealed by Giske's participation in Barbieri's “Light Years” tour. Each track takes shape from a dichotomous clash between body and machine, with Caterina Barbieri's patterns conceived to be gradually “worn” by Giske, who reveals about the album's genesis: “Caterina forced me to get to the heart of who I am and what I have to offer.”

So the album moves from the opening “Intuition, Nimbus”, which sounds as if it stepped straight out of “Bokoboko” by Burnt Friedman, particularly in its exotic opening rhythm, before everything converges into a kind of synthetic wormhole. “Alignment, Orbit” in turn expands on that restlessness, scattering the two different compositional approaches into a nebula. Meanwhile “Impatience, Magma” smooths out the mood, with a weeping sax in the background opening the door to what turns out to be an ethereal synth dance in Barbieri's signature style.

“Persistence, Buds” closes, in meditative fade-out, a well-architected and finely crafted joint album. It's one of those records that inevitably gain greater depth live, underscoring how much it still matters for two curious souls to meet in the flesh and, time after time, discover each other's singularities, with the ultimate aim of letting them lovingly collide in a space-time that is anything but figurative.

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20/03/2026