Caterina Barbieri is an Italian composer who has built a decade-long practice around a single wager: that repetition, patiently permuted, can alter the listener's consciousness. Working primarily with modular synthesis — first the Buchla 200, then an ER-101 sequencer driving a harmonic oscillator — she makes music the press variously calls a "dreamachine for the ears" and a means to "bend time and space" (Pitchfork). Born in Bologna in September 1990, she is based in Berlin and, since November 2024, serves as Artistic Director of the Music Department of La Biennale di Venezia for 2025–2026.
Formation
Barbieri's route to electronic music ran through the classical guitar. She earned a diploma in the instrument at the Conservatorio G.B. Martini in Bologna in 2012 under Walter Zanetti — a teacher who would later resurface as a collaborator on Fantas Variations — while spending her nights at noise and metal shows: Keiji Haino, Prurient, Corrupted, Sunn O))). An Erasmus exchange took her to Stockholm, where study at the Royal College of Music and the storied Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) put her in front of a Buchla 200 in 2013. She describes the encounter in near-religious terms: "the control panel acted as a portal of access to a hidden psychic potential"; "the Buchla taught me a way of listening to sound that years of training in classical music never taught me." A second G.B. Martini diploma in electroacoustic composition followed in 2014, and a University of Bologna degree in Modern Literature in 2015, with an ethnomusicology thesis on American minimalism and Hindustani classical music — the two traditions she still names as her bridge into electronics.
The records
Her solo debut Vertical (2014) — Buchla 200 and voice, recorded at EMS — appeared on cassette via Important Records' Cassauna offshoot. The breakthrough came three years later: Patterns of Consciousness (Important Records, May 2017), a double LP composed exclusively with an ER-101 quad sequencer and a single Verbos Harmonic Oscillator, wringing illusory counterpoint and baroque-lute arpeggiation from a deliberately starved palette. It landed on best-of-2017 lists at The Wire, FACT and Boomkat. Born Again in the Voltage (Important, 2018) reached further back — EMS recordings from 2014–15 with cello and voice — before Ecstatic Computation (Editions Mego, May 2019) delivered her most acclaimed statement: six tracks led by the ten-minute "Fantas", framed by the label as computation turned into "a creative, psychedelic practice to generate temporal hallucinations."
The catalogue then deliberately multiplies outward. Fantas Variations (Editions Mego, 2021) handed "Fantas" to eight collaborators — Kali Malone's two-organ requiem, Bendik Giske's saxophone-and-voice transcription, Walter Zanetti's electric guitar, Jay Mitta's singeli version, and ensemble and electronic reworkings by Evelyn Saylor with Lyra Pramuk, Annie Garlid and Stine Janvin, Baseck, Carlo Maria and Kara-Lis Coverdale — treating the remix album as what the label copy calls "active and collective re-imagination." In July 2021 she founded her own platform, light-years, inaugurating it with "Knot of Spirit" featuring Lyra Pramuk and a series of curated showcases (Nextones, Draaimolen, later Centre Pompidou, Southbank Centre and Berlin Atonal). Spirit Exit (light-years, July 2022), written in a two-month Milan lockdown in early 2020, was her first album composed in the studio and the first to carry her own voice, guitar and strings — "less minimalist, more maximalist," she told FACT, with St. Teresa of Ávila, Emily Dickinson and Rosi Braidotti as named presences. Myuthafoo (2023) is a companion piece to Ecstatic Computation recorded in the same period on the same ER-101 techniques; the label reissued Ecstatic Computation the same year with the bonus track "Perennial Fantas." A four-track EP with Bendik Giske, At Source (LY009), followed in February 2026, and EMS lists her among its guest composers for 2026 — a return to the studio where her first records were made.
The practice and the ideas
Three commitments recur across her interviews. First, repetition as psychoactive instrument: "a pattern creates a certain state of consciousness," she writes of the Patterns album; change the pattern and you perturb the field of forces holding the listener's attention — the music's subject is the change in the listener, not in the material. Second, composition as human–machine feedback: generative sequencing, delay networks and SuperCollider make the instrument a co-author, "a negotiation between the design of the technology and the design of the human brain." Third, an explicit refusal of gear culture — "I've never read a manual. I've never jammed with the modular. I hate this whole modular music scene" — the machine matters as a spiritual portal, not as apparatus.
She treats pieces as "living organisms" that develop on stage and records as snapshots of a process; critics oblige by reading her work between kosmische euphoria and austere minimalism, an "angelic-evil tension" she has named herself. Since Spirit Exit she has extended the synthesis to her own voice — "an extension of my modular synthesizer" — and to curation: her Biennale Musica 2025 statement frames "cosmic music" not as a genre but as "the generative power of music to create new worlds", in which "the ecstasy of listening" dissolves rigid notions of time and space.
Collaborations and context
Her circle is unusually stable: Kali Malone (the Upper Glossa duo premiered at Berlin Atonal 2016, "Glory" on the XKatedral cassette, the two-organ Fantas variation, and a co-composed piece for Massimo Bartolini's organ at the 2024 Venice Biennale's Italian Pavilion), Bendik Giske, Lyra Pramuk, Evelyn Saylor, Carlo Maria (Punctum's Remote Sensing, 2017), Walter Zanetti, and visual collaborators Ruben Spini (the Time-blind AV show) and Marcel Weber/MFO. In 2019 she joined the Warp Publishing catalogue; her first feature score, for Pascual Sisto's John and the Hole, was a Cannes 2020 official selection that premiered at Sundance in January 2021.
What the record does not settle
The seams are small but real. Reference sources disagree on her birthday (14 vs 16 September 1990); release-day details drift by a few days across listings; and the "RBMA Tokyo alum" tag that travels with her bio does not match the academy's published Tokyo 2014 roster — the documented link is performing at RBMA-branded events. Her Wikipedia article carries a promotional-content notice, so education details here lean on the La Biennale and EMS institutional bios.
This index was compiled from public sources and does not imply the subject's endorsement. Citations live in the packet's source catalog.