With Barker at Primavera Sound 2025 - Line Noise

Exploring Barker's Beatless Dance Music and Its Context You're listening to Radio Primavera Sound proudly presented by Kupra. Speaker 2 Hello, hello and welcome to Line Noise Live at Primvera Sound Festival. It gives me great pleasure to say I'm here with Sam Barker AKA Barker, who has made one of the albums of the year in stochastic drift. How are you doing? Speaker 3 Very good. Speaker 2 Did I say the name right? Because I just occurred to me she did. Yeah. OK. Now, as I as we were just talking off mic, I was trying to explain to my wife what it is you do with your music. And I came up with the description that's quite often used, which is you do dance music without bass drums, which is probably something you've heard many a time, is that it's a bit limiting, but it's that kind of a fair description. Speaker 3 I would say that's what I've been best known for over the last, the last sort of five, seven years or so. It's not the only thing I do. I don't have any. I don't hold any grudges against kick drums. I don't know. It's not quite true. I find them a little bit pushy and and obnoxious sometimes, but but but yeah, that's a that's a fair a fair description. I've heard worse. Speaker 2 Another thing I was trying to sort of talk about was where to where to listen to your music because it combined again, I was talking about I'm going to see you tonight and it kind of combines element of, of the club and it combines elements that you might expect to hear, you know, outside of the dance floor. Do you think of environment when you make music? Speaker 3 I do a lot actually that's I think one of the, one of the sort of main parameters for, for especially for sort of mixing and. And you know, once an initial idea has sort of emerged, I'll think about where it's where it's going to be useful or where it's going to be presented in the best kind of context. Context is quite important. I think with early, with the earlier experiments with the beatless stuff, I was planning to play stuff in Berkheim. And that was that was kind of my testing ground for these for for debiasing and utility. Less so with utility. I was more imagining that as a as a sort of listening album. I mean, it sounds strange to call music listening music is what you do with it. But yeah, I, I wanted to sort of have a bit more of a broad place to put, to put the album. So, so that, yeah, I think, I think I wanted it to work in a lot more places than just in a, in a club for the for the album. But yeah, it's, I think it, it a lot of a lot of decisions are made based on where I think it might be played or might be used. Speaker 2 It's interesting because stochastic drift for me feels very warm, almost Mediterranean. But you live in Berlin, right? Which is just not warm and Mediterranean. Speaker 3 I do we have to fantasize about warmth? Yeah. I mean, it's Berlin can be quite warm, I guess the yeah, I guess there's a, there's a sort of stereotype of cold, grey and then the winter it certainly is. But but there's there's, there's sunshine for some months of the year in the summer. Not, not quite like Barcelona, but it's yeah, it's not as, it's not as bleak as as, as the, as the stereotype, I'd say. Unpacking the Meaning and Creation of Stochastic Drift Stochastic means, and I obviously had to look this up, having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analysed statistically but may not be predicted precisely. How does that relate to your work? Speaker 3 Well, the the album was it was started in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic and the intention was at that point, since it was unclear how long lockdowns might be going on for. It was started as a sort of follow up to utility and, and then as time went on, all sorts of changes started happening. The, you know, the, the club, which was my sort of stability was closed and they turned that into a gallery space. I was asked to do an installation in the, in the, it was a Studio Berlin exhibition. There was 100 artists doing exhibiting work there. And I did a automated mechanical piano that I put in the in the downstairs toilets of the Burkhine. And, and that was supposed to be a couple of months to turn into eight months. And the label was put on hold. So the album plan was kind of shelved. And in any case, I didn't really know what the what I wanted music to do at that point. You know, it didn't make sense to do kind of dance music. It seemed like a bit of a tease to kind of indulge in that in that line of line of work. And yeah, just, it seemed it, it seemed like everything was kind of collapsing or everything that I felt was stable and predictable that had had had gone completely off the rails. And, and so it was actually, it was quite difficult to finish the record. I, I, I got into lots of different sort of sound processes, started exploring a bit deeper the mechanical music ideas that that I've been playing with. And, and all of this was, was kind of leading to just, yeah, it was quite exciting. I was making music that I wasn't, wasn't expecting and didn't, didn't sort of plan to make. But these, these, these tracks were coming out. It was quite, it was quite difficult to see what the, because at the end the, the label manager, Joachim at small town Super Sound, he, he picked out this selection of tracks from what I've been doing and it spanned the whole time of, from the beginning of the pandemic until until, yeah, six months before it was released. So it was, it was a really broad range of stuff. And, and so the we, we, we spent quite some time trying to sequence the tracks and trying to find the, the right order. And in the end, the what made the most sense was to kind of organize the tracks in a sort of chronological order. Because then there was this sort of Arc that we both noticed of the the start being sort of quite deliberate ideas and quite sort of, yeah, quite sort of sharp and on the grid. And then as sort of time went on, things, things got a lot more unpredictable and UN unfocused. I don't know, maybe that's not the right framing, but it, it, it took its own direction. My, my, my studio time was, was was kind of changed a lot in those in those years. So, yeah, Stochastic Drift fitted as a title for this, this kind of process of of yeah, going off course and, and yeah, sort of dealing with dealing with uncertainty was the was the, the theme that that I, I kind of retroactively observed about the about the music. Speaker 2 So I, I could talk to you for ages, but I've got, I've got one last question for today. If you want to come back sometime, that would be very welcome. Barker on Unfooting Listeners and Final Thoughts But what I really wanted to ask is, do you like sort of slightly unfooting people with your music? Like they think they're going to get something and they get something a bit different. Speaker 3 I love that experience myself when I listen to music. I think, yeah, I guess people have their own biases towards what they want to hear. Some people like to have have their predictions confirmed. People like to. Some people like to know when, when things are going to happen. And there's, there's, you know, great formulas in dance music for this kind of predictive way of composing but or predictable way of composing. But yeah, I like, I like to be surprised. So I kind of try to try to sort of put some of put some of that into the into the music. Speaker 2 It was an absolute pleasure to speak to you. You're playing in one hour at the warehouse. It's going to be yes. Speaker 3 Looks like it. Speaker 2 It's going to be amazing. Thank you so much for coming along and pleasure. Speaker 3 Hope it. Speaker 2 Goes very well, Matt. Thank you. Speaker 1 You're listening to Radio Prima Rena sound proudly presented by Copra.