At Source

Long before Caterina Barbieri’s Eurorack met Bendik Giske’s tenor saxophone, the two artists were already on the same wavelength. The Italian modular savant and the Norwegian reed player have both situated their sounds to the left of center, thriving at the edges of their respective instruments and conservatory educations. Giske uses his classical training to translate his experiences on Berlin’s queer techno circuit into gymnastic transmutations of breath. Barbieri, recently named artistic director of Venice Biennale’s music department, once got booted from a church venue because a priest found her music “satanic.” Their first joint EP, At Source, gathers four hypnotic improvisations that move like drill bits, spiraling towards a creative core that’s classicist in execution and primal in nature.

Giske and Barbieri first came face to face in 2019, when both performed at Swiss gallery Kunsthaus Glarus. That encounter spurred a conversation about “transitions as a compositional force”—in layman’s terms, change as inspiration. It was Barbieri who first made their mind-meld manifest, inviting Giske to reconfigure her track “Fantas” for saxophone and voice. He turned in one of the few genuinely gripping edits on 2021’s Fantas Variaciones, and within a year they’d taken up a joint artist residency with Milan’s ICA and toured on a label showcase for Barbieri’s light-years imprint. At Source puts seven years of joint practice and mutual magnetism to tape without dulling the dynamic buzz of their live sets.

It’s tempting to say that Giske’s horn is an extension of himself. It’s more accurate to say that he is an extension of his instrument. His playing is both muscular and multifaceted; to record his last solo LP, 2021’s Cracks, he and producer Amund Ulvestad rigged miniscule microphones across his sax, his body, and his studio. Giske wanted to communicate the experience “of being inside” his horn. You hear each key pad clacking like a shadow tom line; you sense the tightness of his chest, the tension roiling under his collarbones. At the close of “Alignment, Orbits,” you’d be forgiven for not realizing that the clicking, clapping rhythmic outro is just his fingers tapping across his saxophone, not a separate kit.

With Barbieri’s synthwork, that surround sound becomes literal. “Intuition, Nimbus” opens At Source with an eerie Giske solo, all tremolo and hoarse honks, which only rings lonelier as Barbieri’s atmospherics coalesce like storm clouds overhead. Barbieri often composes for cavernous spaces, and “Intuition, Nimbus” indicates her ability to conjure scale in miniature. By the time the track fades into “Alignment, Orbits,” which builds off a smudgy, arpeggiated loop as light and layered as windchimes, you’ve barely even noticed Barbieri take the lead. It’s by design—she and Giske pass off melodies with the precision of Olympic relayers, so smooth and succinct they blur the borders between acoustic and electronic, earthly and divine.

Each of the four tracks on At Source has a two-word title, split down the middle with a comma. One word captures Giske’s mode; the other, Barbieri’s. Depending on the tone or the song, the comma can come to signify boundary or bridge. On the 11-minute “Impatience, Magma,” Giske begins in the lead, layering lolling broken chords, glissandos, and key rattles into an uneasy one-man symphony. Before the fretting reaches a head, one of Barbieri’s backing oscillators creeps forward into a nimble major-key ostinato that sounds like it was lifted from a Lorenzo Senni daydream, transforming a slight shift in timbre and time signature into a crescendo of new hope. It’s the closest thing the EP has to a centerpiece, and exemplifies the exuberant catch-and-release code this duo has cracked.

Improvisation is inherently spontaneous; rarely does the technique feel as measured and methodical as on At Source. The two musicians bound into brilliant lockstep on At Source, intuitively intertwining and untangling in a dance with cat-and-mouse stakes and a boundless playing field. Closing composition “Persistence, Buds,” a deconstructed waltz that opens in a hissing haze reminiscent of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, positions Giske and Barbieri opposite their roles on “Intuition, Nimbus,” with the former’s freeform sax tones doing the world-building and the latter’s rig charting a course through the bluster. The loops and patterns this pair trades in don’t exactly have hearts, or cores. But they do have sources, points where beginning meets end and familiar cycles find new life. In Giske and Barbieri’s hands, the journey toward these spaces is about as centering as it gets.