The Italian synthesist takes us to the top of Mount Etna for a special live performance.

For this episode of Patch Notes, we travelled with Caterina Barbieri to Sicily and recorded a session near the summit of Mount Etna, one of the world’s most active volcanoes. Amidst bubbling lava flows, Barbieri performed live versions of ‘At Your Gamut’ and ‘Terminal Clock’, taken from her 2022 album, Spirit Exit.

The session was filmed as part of our recent documentary on Barbieri, which followed the Italian musician as she returned to live performance following the pandemic and debuted the light-years concept around Europe. “I like to think of sound as a spiral that connects the physical world with the metaphysical world,” she explains in the film.

Barbieri’s music, which combines modular synthesis, vocals and other instrumentation, has evolved across several albums including Patterns of Consciousness and Ecstatic Computation. On 16 June, Barbieri will release a sister album to Spirit Exit titled Myuthafoo, which was largely written while touring with a process that responded to the “nomadic, interactive energy” of life on the road.

Follow Caterina Barbieri on Instagram and pre-order Myuthafoo here.

Credits:

Directed and produced by Pedro S. Küster
Extra footage by Sofia Küster
Sound by Caterina Barbieri

Special thanks to Parco dell’Etna, Regione Siciliana, Ministero dell’Ambiente, Federparchi, UNESCO, Daniela Pavone, Luciano Di Marco, Paride, Pippo and Ruben Spini

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