I mentioned this in advance of its publication, but mistakenly not afterward. Last month I had the pleasure of reviewing the great new Caterina Barbieri album for Pitchfork. Titled Myuthafoo, it’s a follow-up to her 2019 album Ecstatic Computation, with the added benefit of muting her voice in favor of a sound-first exploration (per the review, nothing against her voice in general — the simplicity just works well here). Here’s my opening paragraph:
Nothing signals synthesizer psychedelia quite like the combination of an arpeggio and a delay. The arpeggio divides a chord into looping sequences of notes. The delay allows those sequences to overlap. Once set in motion, the pairing can sound like a hall of mirrors receding toward infinity. When employed by dilettantes, it’s a simple trick that gets tired fast, but in the right hands, it’s magic. Caterina Barbieri is a wizard—and she knows a lot of other spells, as well.
And you can read the full review at pitchfork.com.