We all dance away our lives to the tune of the sovereign pleasure-pain axis. David Pearce, The Hedonistic Imperative

Addiction to pleasure and avoidance of pain as a rave metaphor fits Sam Barker's music. Over the years, the Berghain resident and Leisure System co-operator has explored the euphoric potential of changing variables in dancefloor stenciling.

This was particularly true of his Ostgut Ton EP debut Debiasing, which was brimming with unconventional rhythmic chord progressions, melodies and percussion but omitted the kick drum. What seemed like an experimental exercise on paper was actually made for the club: pieces that worked on the dance floor, but refused the often given kick drum dictates and the associated genre categorization. This is how Barker's sound has defined itself.

But on his debut solo album Utility, Barker turns his attention to merging experimentation and dancefloor pragmatism with the psychology behind the musical decision-making process. In his own words: After Debiasing, it occurred to me that my musical choices are often unintentionally utilitarian, following an instinct to maximize happiness in one way or another. It's quite unfashionable to admit this. But by omitting elements with strong genre associations, this became a fairly natural consequence.

Accordingly, Utility is a playful, teasing but unironic musical approach to a whole spectrum of utilitarian and transhumanistic concepts: from models for the quantification of well-being and gradients of bliss to the abolition of suffering for sentient beings (meaning: not just humans). the ethical use of drugs and nanotechnology. Over the course of nine tracks, Barker's vision ebbs and flows with waves of deeply psychedelic musical vignettes; free-flowing and futuristic melodies and rhythms as targeted brain stimulation. The sound is based heavily on modular synthesis, just as home-made mechanical sound generators, instruments and plate reverbs create atmospheres that seem both alien and emotionally familiar, functional and utopian.

Utility is by no means a concept album. Rather, it is an honest examination of music as a means of maximizing joy and expanding consciousness. 

Label:
Ostgut Ton OSTGUTLP32
Format:
2 × vinyl, LP, album
Country:
Germany
Published:
06 Sep 2019
Genre:
Electronics
Style:
Techno, Neo Trance

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