Milan-based composer Caterina Barbieri premieres new music for Lampo and the Chicago Architecture Biennial—in a special multi-channel performance and her local debut.

Here, she plays pattern-based synthesizer music amid the epic, ornately patterned Preston Bradley Hall. Barbieri uses repetition to trigger spatial and temporal hallucinations, where the perception of the present is constantly refreshed, in an endless sense of loss, re-discovery, and the search for self-orientation. One expects that these notions are enhanced by the ample hang time in tonight’s venue.

Caterina Barbieri (b.1990, Bologna, Italy) is an Italian composer who explores themes related to machine intelligence and object-oriented perception in sound through a focus on minimalism. She is interested in the polyphonic and polyrhythmic potential of synthesizers to draw complex geometries in space and time. Her 2017 2LP Patterns of Consciousness was named in several “best of” music round-ups. She has performed at MaerzMusik and Berlin Atonal, Mutek, Unsound, Sonar, Primavera Sound, Barbican Centre, Philharmonie de Paris, CTM, Ableton Loop, Moogfest and La Biennale di Venezia. In 2019 Barbieri released the LP Ecstatic Computation on Editions Mego. She lives in Milan, Italy.

Presented in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Biennial; support provided by the Graham Foundation and the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago