BARKER – Utility (2023 Repress) – 2LP – Vinyl

2LP – Black Vinyl.

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.

Now, on his debut solo LP Utility, he turns his focus toward melding experimentation and dancefloor pragmatism with the psychology behind the musical decision making process. 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 his 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.

Tracklist:

A1. Paradise Engineering
A2. Posmean
A3. Experience Machines

B1. Gradients Of Bliss
B2. Hedonic Treadmill

C1. Models Of Wellbeing
C2. Utility

D1. Wireheading
D2. Die-Hards Of The Darwinian Order