Caterina Barbieri © Martin Argyroglo

The first evening of Closer Music is a creative and memorable experience!

On the bill: Caterina Barbieri and Ruben Spini for a live audiovisual performance, aya, a new treasure from the Manchester scene that crosses grime, rap and IDM; Voice Actor, a rare project navigating between dream pop and mutant library music; and the French duo Alto Fuero.
aya © Martin Argyroglo
Alto Fuero © Martin Argyroglo
Voice Actor © Martin Argyroglo
Although Caterina Barbieri's primary material is the synthesizer, her exploratory work is essentially about humanity and organic warmth.

Her compositions are based on the psychophysical effects of repetition and operations based on musical motifs. The result is a true journey of the mind and soundscapes of rare beauty. Spirit Exit, his latest album released by Mego, is a complex and moving work of synthetic and vocal convolutions. His most personal work, free of external influences, gives birth to a totally new world.

Heady vocals, synthetic Andean flutes, otherworldly percussion and hand-played reggaeton, the duo Alto Fuero invents a world music from an imaginary world and stretches the notion of folklore in all directions.

 

Formed by Victoria Palacios and Loto Retina, two artists who express themselves as much in the visual arts as in music, the group makes each of its stage appearances a unique performance. And they succeed in linking avant-garde and popular cultures. 

Signed to the Hyperdub label, aya is another gem of the Manchester scene.

Her 2021 debut album, im hole, came as a shock, a work capable of questioning the world by twisting prejudices. On productions that navigate between radical dubstep, drone and techno art, aya's music is the backdrop for a contortion of views and certainties, an assemblage of pain and pleasure. Hailed by many media outlets as a major recent queer work, this debut album is a powerful and highly personal vision that comes into its own on stage. In addition to her philanthropic work as the self-proclaimed First Lady of the Bootleg, aya is in her third year of a monthly radio residency with NTS.

Voice Actor was originally conceived as a radio project consisting of 110 tracks and sent in that form to the Stroom label.

The result is Sent From My Telephone, an astonishing corpus of sound, to be classified somewhere between ambient, experimental library music, dream pop and noise. A way to claim the strength of the imagination and the existence of a world of possibilities in the interstices of reality.