Mark Barrott’s awe and gratitude at living in an real-life island paradise has informed most of the music he’s made since moving to Ibiza in 2012. The snaky flutes, burbling sequencers, and hand drums that populate his Sketches From an Island series err just on the right side of kitsch, not to mention album covers that resemble illustrated postcards. What keeps him from becoming electronic music’s Jimmy Buffett or Jack Johnson is the genuine sense of wonder his music conjures. There’s no happy-go-lucky humor about how a toke and a margarita are the answer to life’s problems, and no weighty moral lesson to be learned, either. He lives on a balmy Balearic island, it’s beautiful, this is how it is.
As soon as the first piano chord falls on “森林浴 (Shinrin-yoko),” the second track on his new album 蒸発 (Jōhatsu), we’re in for a different kind of Barrott album, one that nudges down the thermostat a few degrees from the Sketches From an Island albums or his early, pseudonymous releases on his International Feel label. What’s striking about the transition so soon after the familiar synths and sequencers of opener “京都 (Kyoto)” is the loss of an anchor. The reassuring pulse disappears and confronts the listener with a pregnant silence. All sorts of thoughts and associations rush in to fill the space, not least the image of Barrott thinking: maybe about which note to play next, or simply about the shortness and transience of life.
Tracks like “Shinrin-yoko,” the field-recordings-and-piano reverie “9月のある金曜日 (One Friday in September),” and the sublime closing drone “神隠し (Kamikakushi)” just feel like they come from a deeper place than “Kyoto” and the album’s other more rhythmic cuts. Maybe it’s because Barrott’s sequencers maintain such urgent momentum that the music never really has time to slow down and collect its thoughts. Maybe it’s just leftover associations with acoustic-leaning ambient albums like Harold Budd’s Perhaps, Grouper’s Ruins, or Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 12, whose sustained piano chords seem to empty into the vastness of the universe. Or maybe it’s the nature of the piano itself, an instrument that lends itself well to depressive slumping, as opposed to instruments like guitars and drums that force you to remain upright.
Jōhatsu was originally commissioned as the score for a film about the titular Japanese phenomenon in which people seemingly disappear from their lives without a trace, often to escape obligations such as debts and dead-end jobs. While the as-yet-unreleased documentary faces funding issues, the soundtrack represents Barrott’s first full-length solo album in over four years. Its origin as film music helps explain pieces like “すべての幽霊を殺す (Kill All Ghosts),” which switches halfway through from a plangent keyboard miniature into a mess of prog-rock synths. But it’s less interesting to imagine this album’s melancholy moments as simply mourning the plight of the jōhatsu than to take the broad view: This is Barrott’s most emotionally gripping album yet, with ample space between the piano chords to locate your own existential quandaries.
