Like a feather within the wind or the worldwide inventory market, all of us are topic to stochastic drift. Originating in superior statistics, the time period refers back to the method by which randomness works upon a system, how the trajectory of a line sways because it’s affected by unanticipated occasions. For Sam Barker, the metaphor of a winding path has been significant lately.
After an prolonged interval as a label runner and live performance booker, the Berlin-based musician entered the highlight with 2018’s Debiasing EP and 2019’s Utility, two data that articulated a weightless, kick-drumless imaginative and prescient of techno. What ought to have been a dizzying ascent was reduce quick by the pandemic: tour cancelled, label shuttered, and hard-won contacts with reserving brokers damaged off. At his lowest second, the artist crammed out paperwork at a job heart and weighed leaving the music business behind. “It was fairly outstanding how the rug might be pulled from every little thing in such an all-encompassing method,” he mirrored in an interview with Tone Glow. “This made it fairly arduous to interact in a rule-based or goal-based method as a result of it appeared like each purpose was altering from one week to the following.”
Barker’s second LP, Stochastic Drift, is each a synthesis of his wilderness years and an exhilarating inflection level. In a subject of good ambient techno producers, he’s delivered his most dazzling and definitive assertion thus far. The strict parameters that guided his early data’ zero-gravity rush have dissolved into freeform experimentation, permitting his tracks to billow and burst because the temper calls for. Throughout the album, Barker blurs analog and mechanized devices into gauzy clouds, jazzy ambiance, and stylish percussion. He navigates extremes, toggling between aural chaos and hyper-mediated expertise by harnessing randomness for all its energy.
On early solo releases, Barker dedicated himself to limiting his personal expertise with an depth that may make Brian Eno blush. In interviews, he might often sound like a level-headed startup founder, phrasing his concepts when it comes to inputs and outputs and making a cool but impassioned case for techno disruption. The distinction was that Barker was involved with scrambling expectations relatively than optimizing outcomes. Taking inspiration from engineering, likelihood concept, and social psychology (and titling most tracks after associated ideas), he set utilized sciences to a dancefloor pulse. The frequently cresting trance of “Hedonic Treadmill” or “When Prophecy Fails” was a product of limitation, ingeniously making up for the tracks’ lack of thump with pillowy texture, glassy melodies, and ceaseless ahead movement.
