RICHARD BARBIERI CASTS A SPELL
Fourth solo album’s “strange dreams and imagery” are fuelled by forest wanderings.
Richard Barbieri releases his fourth full solo album,
Under A Spell, via Kscope on February 26. It’s a very different beast to the work he’d imagined as the follow-up to 2017’s acclaimed Planets + Persona.
“I was going to travel around Europe, work in different studios, have large ensembles playing – it was going to be, let’s say, a social thing,” he says. “And of course what happened was the very opposite!”
Instead, the record was written and recorded at home, “with all this strangeness going on outside.” Everything conspired, he adds, to produce “these strange dreams and imagery, which became my template for the work.”
Having moved out of London last year, Barbieri found that the off-kilter surrealism of our current times was alleviated by walks in woods and forests, which informed his music. “Again, it’s a little bit creepy, with a sense that very odd things might have once gone on there, amid the silence,” he says. “But it became a case of trying to capture all these atmospheres. I was kind of compelled to make this album.”
Former Brand X bassist Percy Jones features on the track
Serpentine. Among the enigmatic, cinematic atmospherics and guileful grooves there are flickers of almost subliminal voices – sound elements rather than singing – by Swedish musician Lisen Rylander Love (who guested on Planets + Persona) and Marillion singer Steve Hogarth, who made the 2012 album Not The Weapon But The Hand with Barbieri.
Gratified that he’s always been able to make the music he wanted to make, Barbieri adds: “I’m still coming at things from a different angle. And that, I guess, will always produce something a little different.”
After rising to fame as a member of art-pop pioneers Japan, keyboardist and groundbreaking synth subverter Barbieri has worked with a variety of collaborators, notably spending 17 years with prog giants Porcupine Tree, with whom he made nine albums. “You never know,” he teases when asked if that band will ever return from their lengthy hiatus.
The new reissue of Japan’s Quiet Life
has also swung the spotlight back onto him. “It’s my personal favourite Japan album,” he says, “although Tin Drum is the best work.” He’s recently started writing again with former colleague Steve Jansen, and, on a separate project, with Tim Bowness. CR
“It became a case of trying to capture all these atmospheres.”