Concerts 2024
9/29/24 Hanse 3, Dresden
9/27/24 MS Stubnitz, Hamburg
9/22/24 Madame Claude, Berlin
"Barel refines the gleefully indefinable aesthetic of his debut, while pushing out into even more disorienting waters."
"Even though his music is more dramatic and rangy than the early experiments of Raymond Scott, it has a similar combination of man and machine, like the sound of robots clearly controlled by a master."
- Marc Masters, Bandcamp Daily
"Music illuminated by a thousand colors and shades, chameleonic, joyful and ironic, unclassifiable."
- Massimiliano Busti, Blow Up (IT)
"Composer and synth fantasist Ori Barel attempts to bash '90s electronica against dadist Krautrock and avant classical music on the ambitious Alkaline River. Think Plaid jamming with Art Bears and Faust and you'll have a good line into this one."
- Bookmat
"Sounds like the Kronos Quartet on amphetamines, this is a ride you’ll be sure to enjoy."
Ori Barel is a Los Angeles-based composer and sound artist whose work spans electronic, electroacoustic, and acoustic music. His most recent album, Bronze, Beige, Morse, was featured in The Wire, which described it as "a dizzying, hyperactive kaleidoscope of impulses" with "a keen, albeit maddeningly abstract logic." His work has also been featured on An Taobh Tuathail on RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta, Ireland's leading platform for ambient and experimental music, and on BBC Radio 3's Unclassified.
Barel draws inspiration from algorithmic processes, improvisation, sound design, and field recordings. His chamber works have been performed by Seth Josel, Lucia Mense, Kacey Link, Eran Borovich, Anne La Berge, The Formalist Quartet, Ear Unit, and Trio Kobayashi, in venues such as MOSA series (New York), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Ballhaus (Berlin), Santander Festival (Spain), and Beyond Baroque (Los Angeles).
He has performed his electronic music at ICMC, REDCAT, Center for New Music (San Francisco), Stanford University, Mills College, and UCSD. His sound installations have been presented at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Tel Aviv Museum, and the Jerusalem Artists' House.
He holds a B.A. in music composition from UCLA, an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts, and a Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara, where he worked closely with Clarence Barlow and Curtis Roads. He has released four solo albums with Unseen Worlds, Centaur, and Albany Records.