It’s easy to equate Mark Barrott’s music with the “Balearic” ideal of Ibiza. Even when the British-born producer still resided in Uruguay, his imprint International Feel released electronic music that venerated the sound of that Mediterranean isle, which Philip Sherburne described last year in assessing the Balearic revival as a “fusion of synth pop, yacht rock, acid house, faux reggae, and ambient music.” And when Barrott himself relocated to Ibiza in 2012 he aligned himself with Balearic explicitly with a series of EPs that culminated in the full-length Sketches From An Island.
While affiliating himself with Ibiza and naming his second full-length for it once more, Barrott moves into a more rarefied space on Sketches From An Island 2, an example of a sequel surpassing the original. Some moments of the album hearken back to the eclectic catalog of genres that define “Balearic”: opener “Brunch With Suki” has the stiff swing of library music and the gentle guitars of “Driving To Cap Negret” touch on island favorites like Chris Rea and Andreas Vollenweider. Yet Barrott isn’t keen to just replicate these island-friendly timbres, opting for Ableton and a few plug-ins to achieve a sound that would otherwise require an entire room of exotic instrumentation.
But as the album moves deeper, such earmarks start to fall away, and rather than think about what Ibiza means in the 21st century, SFAI2 starts to reflect the natural beauty of the surrounding landscape in its beautiful, spare melodicism. “Over at Dieter’s Place” does not reference Cluster member Dieter Moebius, but the track suggests the bucolic miniatures that the group once rendered, with Barrott weaving together small bits of pedal steel, woodwind, mbira, birdcall and the rhythms of a hand drum into a sparkling miniature.
“Distant Storms At Sea” is somber and dramatic, blurring together thumb piano, a processed horn line that brings to mind Jon Hassell, a guitar line from collaborator Jordan Humber and booming percussion that –like the actual thunderstorm on the track—looms over all without ever bursting. Throughout, the drums that Barrott adds are subliminal rather than foregrounded, making the album less of a tool for a DJ set and more for providing a fitting conclusion to a night out. The last two songs are Barrott’s most evocative to date, “Forgotten Island” a minor-key rumination that gives pause, and closer “One Slow Thought” which offers the sort of mindful cleansing that Barrott suggested in a recent interview.
The album peaks with “Cirrus & Cumulus” and “Der Stern, Der Nie Vergeht.” The former is a gentle polyrhythmic blend of birdcalls and shimmering African percussion that suggests Music for 18 Musicians, while the latter mixes talking drum, fretless bass and a plug-in that mimics an old analog synthesizer, its melody drifting higher and higher. The title translates as “the star that never fades” and seeing as four of the album’s nine tracks bear titles evoking the skies above, Sketches From An Island 2 sounds like something increasingly unmoored from Ibiza and the notion of “Balearic,” floating instead towards a more heavenly sound.
