- Barker flips his signature no-kick-drums trick on its head.
- For a resident at the world's foremost techno club, it's still kind of surprising to think that Sam Barker's solo work is almost entirely free of kick drums. The Berlin-based producer and DJ crafts psychedelic club music, free from kick drums. While Barker's dance tracks favor trance-inducing melody, his mixes and collaborations with nd_baumecker have skewed more percussive. This duality is one of Barker's most intriguing qualities, but it's also created a divide between his identities as a selector and producer.
Barker's new EP, Unfixed, pushes back on his aversion to thump. It takes the formula explored on the 2019 EP Barker 001 and turns the energy up a couple more notches. Built around bass tones shaped by modular synthesis, it's his feistiest release to date. If projects like Utility and Debiasing seemed fixated on messing with your head, Barker's latest aims for the gut.
On paper, Unfixed is more straightforward than Barker's past music. But the tracks here are ornate and dense, rewarding focused listening. "Birmingham Screwdriver" is carried by distorted kicks that churn over sharp, thrashing snare sounds. "Golden Hammer" is similarly intense, using crunchy drums and gauzy synths to cultivate an off-kilter atmosphere. The eight-and-a-half-minute "Percussive Maintenance" is comparably gentle, though still knotty—tendrils of echoing melody dart in and out of rhythms that jitter at random. "Wick And Wax" is the smoothest cut on the EP, centered on meditative synth pads, placid leads and a dubby techno groove. With the exception of "Wick And Wax," maybe, it would take a pretty adept DJ to mix the shifty material on Unfixed into a techno set.
Barker also deploys unusual time signatures to disorient. This pattern carries over onto Unfixed, letting it sit nicely alongside past records despite its differences. "When you're mixing a track with a kick drum, you have to be careful with the other elements because the kick usually takes up much of the space. There's so much energy in the low end already, and everything else has to accommodate that," he told XLR8R in a 2019 interview. Forcing ambience to take the backseat, Unfixed draws a throughline between the Barker we've met behind the decks and the one we've previously encountered in the studio.
Tracklist01. Birmingham Screwdriver
02. Wick And Wax
03. Golden Hammer
04. Percussive Maintenance