Marc Barreca

Seattle-based artist Marc Barreca has crafted otherworldly, unconventional music since the 1970s, drawing on field recordings, acoustic instruments, digital loops, and MAX/MSP processing to generate dense, surrealist soundscapes that resist simple ambient classification. In the late 1970s he issued experimental cassettes both as a solo performer and alongside the kosmische-inspired trio Young Scientist. His debut LP, Twilight, appeared in 1980, and he joined the avant-funk/rock collective Savant, yet after the mid-1980s he largely set music aside to pursue a career first as a bankruptcy lawyer and later as a judge. Productivity resumed in the twenty-first century with releases such as the 2015 album Beneath the Mirrored Surface and multiple joint projects alongside K. Leimer.

Mid-1970s experiments, shaped by Cluster and Iannis Xenakis, led to late-decade cassettes that included 1978’s Raw Fish and Green Tea/Surrogate Religions. Together with James Husted and Roland Barker he formed the Berlin School-influenced electronic ensemble Young Scientist, whose early output featured cassettes such as 1979’s Results Not Answers. Barreca’s first LP, Twilight, came out on K. Leimer’s Palace of Lights imprint in 1980; he also contributed to Leimer’s Savant collective, whose sole album, The Neo-Realist (At Risk), surfaced in 1983. That same year Barreca issued Music Works for Industry, a concise, sample-driven set of minimalist pieces carrying a political edge. After 1986’s The Sleeper Wakes he withdrew from recording to concentrate on law, although the track “Messier Crosses the Blue Line,” taken from the unreleased work Warble, surfaced on the 1991 compilation The Aerial #3.

Once Leimer revived Palace of Lights in 2002, Barreca returned to releasing music. The digital collection Big Dahomey Funeral arrived in 2006, and 2010’s Subterrane launched a steady sequence of CD projects. Tremble followed in 2012, Premap (a Leimer collaboration) in 2014, and both the solo Beneath the Mirrored Surface and the further Leimer partnership Field Characteristics in 2015. Growing interest in his earlier catalog prompted Vinyl-on-Demand to issue the solo anthology Tape Recordings 1977-1983 along with an LP of Young Scientist material, while Rvng Intl. released the Savant anthology Artificial Dance. Twilight received a reissue in 2016; Music Works for Industry appeared on vinyl for the first time in 2017, the same year that saw the double-LP Recordings 1978-1979 gather two early cassettes. Further new works included 2017’s Aberrant Lens and Dual Mono (with Leimer), 2018’s Shadow Aesthetics, and 2019’s From the Gray and the Green. Bureau B supplied a proper reissue of Young Scientist’s Results Not Answers in 2019.