Barker

Sam Barker, operating as both a solo artist and one half of the duo Barker & Baumecker, investigates the furthest reaches of dance music from his base in Berlin. A longtime resident DJ at Berghain, he co-founded Leisure System, the event series and label oriented toward radical dancefloor explorations. Whereas the material he creates with Andy Baumecker tends toward dense, meticulously sculpted club techno, his solo work under the Barker name, including the 2019 album Utility, delivers a distinctive strain of luminous ambient techno that commonly dispenses with kick drums. More rhythm-driven territory reappeared on the 2023 EP Unfixed.

Born in England, Barker completed his studies in Brighton amid that city’s experimental music community. He gradually amassed analog synthesizers and began issuing recordings as Voltek. Employment at a booking agency brought him to Berlin in 2007. While arranging a 2008 Autechre performance he met Andy Baumecker, already a veteran Berghain resident, and the two started making music together; simultaneously Barker and Ned Beckett ran Leisure System events. Barker & Baumecker launched their series of exploratory, club-oriented techno releases on the Berghain-affiliated Ostgut Ton label with the 2010 EP Candyflip. Acroplane, an IDM netlabel, issued Power Tools, an album by the more abstract Voltek project, in 2011. Leisure System activated its own label that same year, followed in 2012 by Barker’s debut solo outing under his surname, the fractured, dubstep-adjacent EP Like an Animal. Two full-length Barker & Baumecker albums, Transsektoral (2012) and Turns (2016), appeared while Barker continued refining his individual style.

Debiasing, a four-track EP of euphoric, trance-inflected beatless techno, arrived in 2018. Acclaimed across the dance-music press, that inventive record preceded the more percussive white-label EP BARKER 001 in 2019, itself a prelude to the eagerly awaited full-length Utility. The album landed on multiple year-end lists, and BARKER 002 followed in 2021. Barker wove fresh kick-drum patterns into his established aesthetic on the 2023 EP Unfixed, released via Smalltown Supersound.