“An intricately composed offering from the Italian musician, engineer and producer, ‘Hybr Spiro’ opens up a new chapter.”
CLASH
“If there is any 'supernatural power', it is in the hands of Leonardo Barbadoro”
CNN Indonesia
“Many people still often believe that music must come directly from the hands of a human performer in order to be considered music and have an emotional impact on the listener. With this project I would like to dispel this belief…”
Musicaelettronica
Leonardo Barbadoro, formerly known by his electronic alias Koolmorf Widesen, is an Italian musician, composer, engineer and producer based in Florence. The highly versatile artist released another single, ‘Hybr Spiro’, on October 20th 2023 via Helical records. The track is the second single (following ‘Bomi’) released off his highly-anticipated album Musica Automata, an LP comprised of orchestral music performed entirely by robots. With the official LP recently garnering support from musictech, the initial project and concept, launched a few years ago, gained serious mainstream attention from publications such as Red Bull, Vice, RaiNews, and CNN Indonesia. In addition to this, as Koolmorf Widesen, he has performed alongside the likes of Apparat, Venetian Snares, DJ Spooky and 808 State. Accelerating his momentum, ‘Hybr Spiro’ has already premiered and received support from notable tastemaker CLASH.
Stealing audio tapes from his older brother as a kid, Leonardo began his musical career at a very young age, playing synthesizers and guitar in local bands. Shortly after this he quickly became interested in composition and electronic music. This led him to study at Cherubini Conservatory in Florence where he obtained a degree in “Music and New Technologies”. After an impressive foray into the European electronic and rave scene as Koolmorf Widesen, Leonardo began composing music for an orchestra of automated instruments controlled entirely by digital impulses, making use of the Logos Foundation in Ghent, Belgium. Thus, Musica Automata was born, and in 2018 Leonardo created a crowdfunding campaign to fund the composition and recording of an entire album with the robotic orchestra. Later that year the project was successfully founded, receiving excellent media coverage from the international press. This culminated in a live performance of the installation at Tomorrowland festival in Belgium in 2019.
The ensemble of musical robots that is Musica Automata, includes numerous classical instruments (percussion, woodwind, brass, organ) as well as many unconventional instruments, making it the largest orchestra of robots in existence. The accompanying videos of both singles were shot by videographer Tanja Busking. In the videos you can see the robots playing in the Logos Tetrahedron, the theater where the music from the album has been composed and recorded. The accompanying video to ‘Hybr Spiro’ showcases the sheer amount of elaborately engineered, carefully configured musical and technological elements at play. The viewer is treated to the visual feast of the sheer amount of instruments being used, and watches as an acoustic array of sounds is generated entirely by mechanical and digital impulses. The footage is peppered with playful animations, instruments that glimmer with light as they produce sound and even written lines of programming.
‘Hybr Spiro’ begins with a flurry of percussion - there is a vast array of both traditional and non-traditional instruments weaving a tapestry of delightfully off-kilter polyrhythms. There seems to be more of a percussive emphasis in this track than there was in the melodically-rich ‘Bomi’. A simple, slow four-to-five-note motif is introduced by the titular instrument, the Hybr: an organ with immense tonal variation. A clarinet provides a plaintive microtonal counter-melody as harmonic textures are added in layers. The measured melodic motif moves through timbral and microtonal changes, later taken up by a spinet - an ancient Italian instrument in the harpsichord family. A rich assortment of wind instruments weave in and out of the fray: sousaphone, helicon, bassoon, trombone, French horn, clarinet and oboe all feature. Despite its variation the motif remains constant, while in contrast, the percussion rolls in an array of stony and resonant textures. The track is a true sonic spectacle, compellingly animated by its accompanying video - an exciting taste of what is to come with Musica Automata.
Lorenzo from Helical records commented: “The percussion element – sometimes organic, sometimes peremptory, and mechanical – is a meticulously honed mechanism, which, before guiding the direction of a piece, embraces and counterpoints the harmonic section, infusing it with an unpredictable flow, in constant revolution, though rigorous and necessary in every beat. The percussive mosaic on many occasions follows polyrhythmic tracks, expanding the relationship with the harmonic levels in a space where the variation in forms and directions is the governing principle”.
