Barker : Stochastic Drift
The foundation of techno is its pulse, as it is with club music more broadly—the beating heart that syncs to bodies in motion. It’s inextricable from the makeup of its sound, so much so that when British, Berlin-based producer Sam Barker removed beats entirely from his richly textured and innovative 2019 album Utility, that pulse was still recognizable even as negative space. With mere ghosts of anything resembling a proper beat, Utility still moved in much the same way a more traditional form of techno might, but without the firm, physical throttle.
Stochastic Drift, Barker’s follow-up to that wonderful record and his first in six years, takes a dramatic shift away from Utility‘s M.O. in two notable ways: there are beats, and they don’t always move with metronomic consistency. That’s by design; the term “stochastic drift” is a reference to how randomness affects systems—how the introduction of unforeseen factors creates deviation over time. Barker’s own personal experience with unpredictable factors found him questioning whether to leave music behind as pandemic lockdowns put any such notion of a career in jeopardy. But the end result was an eventual embrace of the introduction of chaos, the likes of which informs his latest, breathtaking set of compositions.
Upon first listen, the earliest sounds on Stochastic Drift feel spiritually connected to those of its predecessor. Its opening track, “Force of Habit,” is steeped in a sleek haze, but with a more palpable kick than anything on his prior album. More than two minutes in, you finally hear the physical sensation of bass, which leaves a lingering absence longer than the note itself, and every time it returns, it feels heavier and more impactful. “Reframing,” by contrast, behaves more like a proper dance track, never overbearing but gradually increasing in mass, while “Positive Disintegration” eases back on the BPMs and halts the urgency in favor of a dubby, elusive downtempo number—one that buzzes and glitches like a machine melting as it comes to a close.
It’s in the back half of Stochastic Drift where a deeper sense of unpredictability sets in, the straight line becoming a curve, and a gorgeous album becomes a brilliantly fragmented one. In employing mechanical instruments, Barker more deliberately enters the corporeal realm, fashioning jazz-inflected IDM in moments like “Cosmic Microwave.” “Fluid Mechanics” is even more revelatory, with its brush of hi-hat percussion and piano tones pushing toward ECM-style elegance; without any prior knowledge, it’d be easy to mistake this as being made by acoustic instruments on a casual listen. It’s gorgeous, one of Barker’s single greatest recorded moments. The breaks on the title track bring the album to a close by seemingly emulating an actual jazz drummer’s improvisational beats, fully fleshing out the physical sensation of the music while fulfilling the conceptual promise of an embrace of the unpredictable—not that the whole of Stochastic Drift could be construed in any way as expected. Barker’s road to transcendence is a delightfully crooked one.
Label: Smalltown Supersound
Year: 2025
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