The World’s Largest Automated Orchestra; Leonardo Barbadoro’s Second Single ‘Hybr Spiro’

Leonardo Barbadoro, Italian musician, composer, engineer and producer based in Florence, believes that making music isn’t just for human hands. Formerly known around the world as Koolmorf Widesen, his electroacoustic experimentation has only become more eccentric. After successfully crowdfunding the construction of an automated orchestral system of robots back in 2018, Barbadoro showcased his automated live installation at Tomorrowland in 2019. Now, in anxious anticipation of the full release, ‘Hybr Spiro’, is the second single and an illuminating taste of Barbadoro’s robotically automated album, Musica Automata, out on November 3 2023, via Helical records. In addition, ‘Hybr Spiro’ premiered on October 20th with coverage from notable iconoclasts CLASH Mag.

On ‘Hybr Spiro’ the unique flaveur of the Florentine’s meticulously mechanized series of interconnected instruments is simply baroque. A harmonious labor of love composed of acoustic harpsichords and electronic impulses, brings boundary to the borderless and explores the ineffable through incompatibility. By arranging the organic movements and dynamic acoustic flow through an intricate instrumentation of inputs, Barbadoro has turned science fiction into reality. A living, breathing musical beast that bellows and blows, as if waking up from a long slumber. Ever quaint with its classical motifs but exceedingly futuristic, the track’s myriad microtonal whispers and flutes confer a captivating piece of conversation between music and machine. Barbadoro sees his approach as a means to explore the functional role of various technical possibilities in the creation of melody. Programming his robots’ ability to ‘compose’ simply aims to add a voice to the already artificial mix. One that is entirely free from disingenuous editing in post-production, where even the reverberations are aspects of Barbadoro’s real-world environment.

Leonardo had this to say about his upcoming release: “Musica Automata represents a turning point in my compositional and instrumental research. It is music that brings together two dimensions often perceived as incompatible, even antithetical: the boundless expressive possibilities of electronics implemented by an acoustic instrumental body in a sensory reality, beating, vibrating, and blowing.”