Caterina Barbieri

Featuring: Ruben Spini

Vigil is the music for an installation by Caterina Barbieri and Ruben Spini, the artist who has long been her creative partner. It was Barbieri's first installation. The pair conceived it for Future Shock, the 2022 exhibition at 180 Studios in London. It returned to the same building for The Vinyl Factory: Reverb, which ran from May 2024 to March 2025. The work joins visual, sculptural and musical elements around an idea that runs through her practice: listening as a way to step outside ordinary time and space. Listeners who know her album Spirit Exit will recognise the music, since it closed that record in 2022 under the title The Landscape Listens.

Barbieri made her name with compositions for modular synthesizer and with electroacoustic work. She has played Unsound, Primavera Sound, the Centre Pompidou and the Southbank Centre, and she has been appointed artistic director of the music department of the Venice Biennale. Spini handled the visual side of Vigil, and the sleeve image is taken directly from the installation. Spirit Exit came out in July 2022 on light-years, and The Landscape Listens was its eighth and final track. In the installation version it runs a little over eight minutes: a beatless synthesizer piece that The Vinyl Factory calls a lush, tender soundscape. There is no pulse to follow, only layers of tone held in place long enough for the listener to settle into them. Reviewing the album for Crack in 2022, Josh Baines said Barbieri saved the best for last. He described the closer as "an eight-minute-long trip to the outer reaches of the beatless atmosphere". At Reverb the piece was also heard in the Listening Room designed by Devon Turnbull. There The Vinyl Factory played it on his handmade high fidelity system as part of its Deep Listening series. That setting suits a composition built on patience and detail rather than on events. The Vinyl Factory then issued it on vinyl in November 2024, under the installation's title.

Pressed on 180-gram clear vinyl and housed in a gloss UV sleeve with artwork designed by Spini, this edition is limited to 500 copies.