BARY CENTER “Just Dust” (New Body)

Bary Center is the Mark Williams of his time, and he also happens to share a body, mind, apartment, effects rig, laptop, and some blood and guts and stuff with Williams, because Bary Center is Mark Williams and Mark Williams is the maestro, the Bary Center of his time. They share time, too. To get to the point, it doesn’t matter whose name is on the cassette’s J-card (it’s Bary Center’s) – what matters is how masterfully the maestro is going to deconstruct electronic and techno music this time around. What matters is how you’re going to feel after you’ve been subjected to a full-length album from a dude who knows how to make it happen, anytime, anywhere. I’ve told you before, because I’ve written about his Speaker Footage release Stop Believing, and if you’ve been paying attention and doing your homework, you know that you’ll be in for something pretty rad.

If Stop Believing was the imperative to Williams’s audience, then Just Dust is the pagan freedom of unending darkness that follows it, the existential status update of supreme discontent. …Wrapped, of course, in an eminently digestible package of inventive beats and melodies, no matter how black the vibe ends up being. Only total immersion will suffice – once you’re strapped in to Just Dust (or vice versa), you’ll be whisked away to an underground reality where you and you alone are there, and each passing second burrows itself deeper into your own mind until you’re only aware of yourself, the darkness, the emptiness, and time itself passing. But, like, in a fun way! That’s what good artists are able to do, anyway – gussy up that disenchantment in a palatable form so that it feels like it’s directed at you and at you alone, but in reality an entire audience equally disillusioned by modern living is able to appreciate it. So, you’re alone, you’re upset about that but you wallow in it, you listen to Bary Center et voila – you’re not alone! But you’re still upset, only it’s about that now, and you wish you could go on wallowing in your own crapulence instead of obsessively checking the ever-growing list of people in the Bary Center chatroom. Are chatrooms even a thing anymore? Doesn’t matter. Just Dust is pulsing in your life and there’s no more room for regret. We’ve ceased dependence on outmoded concepts. We’ve embraced the gritty future. Diving in now, headlong.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Bary Center

New Body

--Ryan Masteller

BARY CENTER “Stop Believing” (Speaker Footage)

Like two celestial objects orbiting each other, Bary Center’s music is massive and constantly in motion. Mark Williams, Bary Center’s alter ego, sets his controls for the heart of the sun and blasts into cosmic bliss throughout his Speaker Footage tape Stop Believing, a fulcrum, a point of balance where electronic dance music serves as the central point around which all matter revolves. It’s an absolute miracle of physics. Hear that, you scientists? I said “miracle”!

But miracles require belief, and Bary Center says, “Stop that, you guys! All that matters is the lights and euphoria, the motion and the rhythm. Let’s get off this stupid planet and manipulate the universe with our minds!” I’m assuming that’s what he’s saying to someone, maybe his own subconscious, as he throws some wicked shapes in his own bedroom while composing his next great techno opus. Because that’s what Stop Believing is, ten tracks of immense dancefloor fodder that burst into color behind your closed eyelids as you lose yourself in ecstasy.

Sometimes recalling Underworld, other times Orbital, and even Aphex Twin here and there, Stop Believing plays like a tourism film for the heyday of excellent and intelligent electronic beatmakers. And it’s no wonder that the artists I just mentioned had some modicum of mainstream success – like them, Bary Center fills these tunes with accessible hooks and inventive ways to package 4/4 rhythms to appeal to the raver (not me) and the internalizer (me) in equal measure. It’s a deft trick, and one that he’s continuing to pull off – see his rapidly growing discography featuring tapes on Crash Symbols, Skrot Up, MJ MJ Records, and others. Right now, throw down your baggage and hit play, lose yourself and Stop Believing. Space magic is happening.

Speaker Footage

Bary Center

--Ryan Masteller