Issue 73 / Dec 2016/Jan 2017

Bido Lito! Dec 2016/Jan 2017
21
The Invisible Wind Factory’s lights are at half-mast. Three
smooth and faceless figures have convened on an altar
of two drum kits and a rack of synths, one of which
has already begun burbling like bubbles racing past your rapid
descent to the abyss. The two drummers each raise an arm,
and nobody is the wiser as to whether they are saluting each
other, adjusting to their physical forms, or inviting down power
from some lofty source above. This drumstick semaphore comes
to an abrupt end as they begin their battery and we leave the
world behind.
They are – this is – BARBEROS, and they are unveiling their
new, self-titled album. Six tracks of otherworldly prog noise
and twin drum assault – ranging from the doomy chanting of
Obladen to Concerto (Reprise)’s klezmer of the damned – are
played in full here tonight, with an ensemble boosted at various
times by acolytes and musicians who have given their bodies
to the morph-suited cause. Over 45 minutes, though it could
have been longer, the closest we get to an intelligible lyric
is an older, English voice: “Yes. I think it’s started. It’s started
moving”. During the interstellar washes of sound that follow, the
only other plausibly oral noises emitted by the larval cerebrum
present are moist and chattering clicks.
Confronted by rows of spandex golems, by the time signatures
in π/4 and raging oscillators of their music, I can see the
separation of mind and body in everyone around me – hearts
are racing, but brains might as well be in jars, with time going
past slower as pulses race. At the end all goes dark, and the final
silhouette of Barberos is a chimera with mallets raised and faces
(do they have faces?) turned to look (do they have eyes?) at the
orgiastic consequences of their set.
One week on from the close encounter at IWF, I yearned to
know more. One glimpse at Barberos was addictive and I longed
to look on Barberos once more. After many hours’ exhaustive
dowsing, there was spandex before me, spandex behind me,
spandex on every side of me, and we communed. Live, there
were three of them, sometimes more. It’s hard to say how many
there were now, but their first statement rang out like grinding
stones.
“We are Barberos, not individuals. We are omni, we are one.”
But you had many more onstage with you at the album
launch, and some of them were clearly All We Are, because they
played right before you, I countered.
“For the launch, we had our friends from Stealing Sheep,
All We Are, Zombina and the Skeletones…” I get the picture.
The church of Barberos has many worshippers. But the voice
continued, “…a.P.A.t.T, The Aleph, and Ex-Easter Island Head
perform with us.” This band has penetrated further than first
seemed. One more utterance came forth: “And others. None of
them are on the album.”
If they’re a multiplicitous entity, that might explain how the
album sounds so vast with only three playing on it. Discovering
that Barberos have friends was disarming, and slowly,
tentatively, a conversation emerged. Track three, Hoyl, begins
with the awestruck voiceover mentioned above. I asked if it was
a sample or one of the three talking.
“That’s Charles Hayward.”
Of This Heat? Wow.
“And of This is Not This Heat, Camberwell Now, and a million
more amazing bands. He’s our mate.”
They don’t just have friends, they have mates. The record
checks out, and Barberos did tour with Hayward in 2012. They
seem to pop up in the real world in distant climes, with no proof
of their travelling between them. They’ve been heard in Salford,
Rheims and Caen, but they seem to favour appearing in Eastern
Europe: Russia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania all have reported
sightings. Rumours that the new shield covering the reactor
at Chernobyl was originally to be made of spandex cannot be
confirmed. As informally as I could, I asked Barberos for their
best live reception and, for contrast, a show where the audience
just didn’t get them. I expected there would be a few tales to
tell, but one answer came forth.
“Veliky Novgorod. A kind of cocktail bar. Everyone was sitting
down, just filming us on their phones. I think they were confused
by us. But then we DJed afterwards and they danced.” Evidently,
this band do have the human touch, assuming the crowd danced
of their own volition. The new album art, photographed by
Justė Urbonavičiūtė, displays them standing before a mysterious
erection. Hoping to bond over the beauty of concrete, I asked
for more information.
“It’s a mad old Soviet concert hall in Vilnius.”
Did you play inside it?
“It’s a mad old Soviet concert hall in Vilnius,” they repeated,
“and there are a few other brutalist buildings we really liked so
we got spandexed in front of them”. ‘Getting spandexed’, as far
as I can tell, is how Barberos assume their physical form. “It was
about minus 10 degrees in November. We took those pictures...
as quickly as possible.” Medieval theologians agonised over the
question of whether the first man, having never been born, had
a navel. It is not possible to tell, from the album’s cover, whether
the band have nipples.
How does something as transient as BARBEROS even get
recorded without the aid of the supernatural?
“We worked with Snorre Bergerud at Ymir Audio in Vilnius. He
has a studio in the national television building that was used for
orchestras to practice and record in. It is massive. He’s a genius
engineer and producer, but the room he has sounds so good.
You can hear a lot of that in the recording.”
Indeed, this album has been almost two years in the making.
Pressing is reported to have taken a long time, possibly
complicated by cursed machinery and the dwindling number
of suitable plants in places conducive to manifestations of
Barberos.
“We recorded the songs almost two years ago. We have
been touring pretty much the same set for a few years now. The
songs have naturally moved, and realigned somewhat.” I drew a
comparison to the sailing stones of Death Valley, but it was met
with silence. Perhaps such questions shouldn’t be asked. As if
the two might be related. After a while, they continued. “We’ve
become more comfortable and freer with them.” It is unclear if
Barberos were referring to the songs or the stones by this point.
Trying to categorise their sound is impossible. Any descriptor
carries so many caveats and palaeographical footnotes as to rob
the genre named of any convenient brevity. To comprehend the
sound of Barberos, one must stop trying to comprehend Barberos
at all. This approach prompted their longest pronouncement yet.
“I think our sound has changed and evolved through many
different things... life, bands we play with, bands we love, food,
dreams, and all things. We find we are often billed with very
different bands. But it seems to work. All manner of metal, jazz,
noise, electro, techno, super-experimental sound art, and weird
pop. The lot. Always alternative.”
I was surprised to hear the word ‘love’ in their answer.
Barberos then turned 45º three times in succession, each time
emitting band names on a supersonic frequency.
“Tangerine Dream. Ruins. This Heat.”
Anyone who watched Stewart Lee’s last Comedy Vehicle
will have seen the post-stand up get grilled by Chris Morris
about irony, his onstage persona, audience complicity, and
the suspension of disbelief. Eventually Morris brings him
to tears, until he’s left gibbering weakly, “This is this… this is
this”. Likewise, as with the Delphic oracle or the Vestal virgins,
you cannot ask mundane questions of Barberos and get mere
answers in return. The new album opens with The Return Of The
Ladius And The Ladius, 15 minutes and a crucial four seconds of
variously-shaped sine waves, vibrating metal, glowing portals
and (invisibly) rushing wind. What is the Ladius? I had to know.
After a few minutes, Barberos lit up and responded. The answer
was cuboid and the faces read thus:
“It is a thing. A state of mind. A feeling. An emotion. A secret.
Yes.”
I suppose that will be one for the listeners to figure out for
themselves, I thought. There was a popping sound and the
answer had gained a seventh side:
“They won’t.”
Who was I to ask inane questions, even in thought alone?
Crouching, in tears, I mumbled in realisation. Barberos is
Barberos.
BARBEROS is out now on Dream Machine Records.
barberos.bandcamp.com