Sam Barker returns with his first solo EP since 2020’s BARKER002, this time on Oslo’s Smalltown Supersound. While Barker’s previous releases—2018’s Debiasing EP and 2019’s Utility LP—explored the possibilities of kickless dancefloor tracks, Unfixed inverts the musical equation, delving into the variability and sonic potential of the kick drum. Still, the final result is not a concept EP. The four tracks emerged from a session that began as both a technical study in bass drum design and an investigation into the cognitive phenomenon of functional fixedness—a mental block that limits an object’s use to its traditional purpose. Employing the “generic parts technique,” which breaks an object into its basic components to reveal new applications, Barker deconstructed the bass drum into its core elements—waveform, transient, and noise—and reassembled them using modular synthesis to create something fluid, expressive, and dynamic. However, what began as a rule-based experiment evolved into a more organic music-making process, free from rigid conceptual constraints. Tracks were started, then set aside—only to be revisited again and again over long stretches of time. Stylistically, the result is a mix of raw, stuttering psychedelic growl, kosmische techno, and infinite variations on a single groove. In this sense, Unfixed sees Barker not only immersed in musical experimentation but also confronting his own compositional and sound design biases. The result is, once again, a sonic and musical framework entirely his own.
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