Both artists are revered for their fluid and evocative command of the modular synthesizer. It's an instrument that has captured the imaginations of countless music producers, exuding a mythical aura that hints at limitless possibilities.

So what the hell is a modular synth, anyways? In short, synthesizers are a category of instrument that use electronic engineering to sculpt sounds. Some synthesizers are a single piece of equipment with many discrete points of adjustment for the sound it makes, others are customized groups of individually collected, single purpose modules patched together - a modular synthesizer.

Modules exist in a kind of collectibles marketplace - like baseball cards, or vinyl, or Star Wars figurines - debated, revered, mythologized, traded. And the cords that patch them together, the path the sound takes through the modules, looking something like a Jackson Pollock piece, is the wizardry.

Many have heeded the call of the modular and crashed on the rocks of gear-obsession and fruitless tinkering. (Techno titan Surgeon once quipped “I encountered modular synthesis quite a long time ago, but I wasn’t really that interested in it because it seemed like you had to spend thousands of pounds to make a very basic kind of ‘clip-clop’ sound, and that didn’t really appeal to me.”) Not so with Barbieri and Cortini. You may have intuited from their names that both are Italian. This perhaps gives them a starting advantage, as they naturally inherit their country’s timeless melodicism. Both marry elegant, memorable hooks to startling, elegant and at times violent sound design. They each show a deft hand and an undeniable musicality that animates the heady, minimalistic and, of course, synthetic approach.

Barbieri had been a beloved cult favorite for a number of years, but in 2019 she released her breakthrough album Ecstatic Computation on Editions Mego. Opening with the transcendent “Fantas,” Barbieri announced herself as an undeniable talent. The track rumbles in through a fog of reverb like a lightning storm over dark waters before tightening up into crisp, driving focus. The cyclical melody that glides fleet footed atop her pulsating arpeggiations threads a line between boundless yearning and soaring ascensions. It’s all there, an infinity in a few notes. The track’s beauty may initially mask its aggression, but there’s no denying that this is music of urgent power as well as contemplative depth. Ecstatic computation, indeed.

Her albums since then have both extended and veered from this precedent. 2022’s Spirit Exit shows Barbieri in full composer mode, using her modular to carve out baroque counterpoint to a pointillistic vanishing point, filling empty gaps with delicious reverb trails or HD industrial grit. Meanwhile, Myuthafoo arrives as the companion to Ecstatic Computation, contrasting with its sibling by lurching into fully-feral noise and kinetic, dynamic movement. It’s a testament to Barbieri’s talent, vision and technical command that she is able to draw such a rich range of expressions from such a cerebral instrument. Barbieri breathes blessed life into the machines.

Alessandro Cortini is a fellow traveler in every way, equally adept at evoking shattering drama from the lilt of a few well arranged notes. Although his work dates back to the very early 2000’s, Cortini came to prominence in 2014 with his landmark album SONNO (Italian for “sleep”) released on noise bastion Hospital Productions. Already the primary synth player for Nine Inch Nails for a decade (Trent Rezor described him as “intense but gentle,” explaining that Cortini doesn’t give off “the I'm gonna attack you energy fans might associate with NIN. Then he started, and within 30 seconds I was like ‘That's the guy!’ I never once regretted it.”), Cortini was both well-connected but relatively unknown as a solo artist - a uniquely challenging position to find yourself in.

SONNO changed that. Recorded on the road, mostly in hotel rooms, the album uses a single synthesizer - the Roland MC 202 (not a modular, FYI) - a delay pedal and textural recordings of the spaces Cortini found himself in. “I liked to walk around the room with a handheld recorder to hear where the sequence would sound better,” he said. “Turn on faucets, open doors or windows to see how the ambient sounds would interact with the MC 202/delay/speaker sound…” The result is a suite of anthems for insomniacs, strange liminal vapor trails that sometimes swell into massive roars and elsewhere dissolve into mesmerizing ephemerality.

Cortini followed up this definitive moment with an absolute deluge of activity. A move from Hospital to the higher-profile Mute (home of everyone from Depeche Mode to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to Diamanda Galas), VOLUME MASSIMO showcases Cortini’s vision with all the scope a major label follow-up would incur without any of the smoothing out that so often mars such releases. But Cortini has also pulled back the curtain, inviting his audience into his process by sharing early modular experiments from 2003 (“I purchased a used Analogue Systems RS system, off a Swedish sale ad. Three rows of modules… This first modular synthesizer became a sonic playground and rekindled my passion for exploring and making sound, without thinking too much about it.”), 35+ minute techno jams and live recordings. Not only that, but in 2021 he collaborated with boutique synth manufacturer Make Noise on the Strega, an “audio alchemical experiment” to incorporate into your modular rack.

If you’re still reading at this point, you’re a champ and are already probably coming to these shows. Either way, we hope you no longer need to be convinced of these artists’ importance. So we’ll leave you with this quote from a recent interview with Cortini on modular synthesis that hints at what makes both his and Barbieri’s music so vital:

“To me it’s the open canvas. As I progressed in my journey with instruments and formed my sensibilities, I’ve encountered several that I fell in love with and others that for some reason or another just didn’t work. The open nature of modular made it easier to develop the path as I discovered it, as opposed to following directions. The process is what will keep the fire lit, not the instrument, in my personal experience.”