Barker meets Gliss
Gliss gets put through its paces by Barker
In this post we kick off a new series in which we get Gliss into the hands of artists we deeply respect. It is our great pleasure to open this series with Barker, a Berlin-based electronic musician and DJ working on the outer limits of dance music.
Since 2018’s Debiasing, Sam Barker’s influence has helped steer the direction of contemporary electronic music. Despite his being musically active for many years previous, notably in the duo Barker & Baumecker, his recent solo work has managed to shape a zeitgeist offsetting bittersweet longing with hyper-articulated, post-human body movements.
His releases for Ostgut Ton (particularly 2019‘s Utility), and most recently, Smalltown Supersound manage to straddle a line between the high-tensile, pump-action flex afforded by modern rhythmic and timbral programming techniques, with a nigh-on pop-level keenness for lilting, heart-string-tugging chord progressions. It’s this balance, combined with a microbial focus on all things-music composition (from developing solenoid-powered percussion devices to self-playing pianos) that’s made Barker an artist to love for new initiates and production nerds alike.
With Bela’s Gliss, Barker has found a powerful new tool for shaping melodies, chord progressions and timbres in his modular system. In this video he uses a pair of Gliss modules to record gestures that alter the melodic contours of the patch, and offset the root note of the chord, creating one of his signature, soaring progressions with tactile touch control.
Gliss is capable of much more than recording gestures and real-time parameter control. To learn more about its extensive and intuitive capabilities, visit bela.io.
Listen to Barker: https://sambarker.bandcamp.com/music
Buy Gliss: https://shop.bela.io/products/gliss
