Mark Barrott

Mark Barrott (born 1968) is an English DJ and record producer.

Early life and career (1981–1996)

Barrott was raised in a "very insular city" "three hours north of London" that was encircled by seven hills.[1] His father was an old car restorer who often traveled throughout the European continent in vintage vehicles. Despite this, Mark never traveled to foreign nations until he was signed to the label Planet Dog in 1996.[1] When Barrott was thirteen years of age in 1981, he began playing synthesizers in groups, motivated by watching a Sheffield City Hall live show of the band Kraftwerk that was part of their Computer World tour.[2] The works of The Human League was another influence of Barrott's early synthesizer career.[2]

Future Loop Foundation (1996–2009)

During his Planet Dog years, he went under the stage name Future Loop Foundation, creating Steve Reich and Brian Eno-influenced ambient drum and bass recordings and being booked at several European gigs.[1][3] The works of A Guy Called Gerald and the label Warp were also inspirations of his recordings released under the moniker.[4] He was the first drum and bass act to perform on BBC Radio 1.[3]

Barrott first met his Black Forest-born wife Sara[4][5] in October 1999 while touring throughout Europe on an airplane and migrated to Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin to live with her.[1][5] When he moved to Berlin, he had gotten tired of producing drum and bass tracks, reasoning that "the tempos were too restrictive in the end,” and began making more Kruder & Dorfmeister-influenced material when he migrated to the city.[6] He felt that "my life had just begun" when moving to the city, and recalled that "It wasn’t like today, where every electronic music producer lives there and it’s become gentrified and safe. It was exciting, it was dangerous. There was a sense that anything was possible."[1] He was paid very little for his performances and gigs while in Berlin, garnering most of his cash from composing for British television.[3] When interviewed by The Ransom Note in 2014, he said that he composed successful pop songs, but did not specify which such pop songs he composed.[3]

Shortly after moving to Berlin, a hotel in Milan made a compilation CD that included one of Barrott's tracks, and invited any artist whose works were included on the compilation to perform at the hotel. As Barrott remembered intending the hotel, "They had this beautiful botanical garden, and I thought, “Shit, if I’m going to DJ, I want to DJ this, not a sweaty club in Poland or somewhere else nuts.”"[1] Given the environment of the hotel, Barrott made an agreement with the manager to DJ there once a week.[1] A DJ and friend of the hotel manager from a Hyatt hotel in Milan was offered by Barrott an iPod containing his playlists. Barrott then gave his content to eight Sheraton hotels, before the Hyatt company employed Barrott to be their music consultant.[1] The next five years involved Barrott traveling to more than 300 hotels across the world. However, his negative experiences during this period also led him to lose interest in music and DJing:

I was living in anxiety-land all the time. I’d fallen out of love with music. I got refused entry to the Hyatt executive board meeting in Chicago because I was wearing flip-flops. The tax situation was a mess, the licensing situation was a mess, and the accountant was tearing his hair out because I was throwing bunches of receipts at him. I could tell that five years of this was the maximum, or I’d end up with a divorce.[1]

International Feel (2009–present)

When the five-year rent of Barrott and his wife's Berlin home was near an end, the couple moved to Punta Del Este, Uruguay, mainly because the two wanted to live in an exotic territory and South America had a good internet connection.[1][5][7] Barrott remembered his Uruguay home to be "very quiet off-season" and having a culture disconnected from Europe's lifestyle. He said in a 2016 interview that "Whatever scene that was going on was a scene in my head. I could invent the scene."[1] Using his five-year experience working for Hyatt, Barrott formed the International Feel label in 2009 to be creative with the music he was making.[1][3][5] Barrott said, "There was no Machiavellian subplot, no big plan—I was just sat on my ass in Uruguay, enjoying the coast and making music to fill the time."[1]

After three years living in Uruguay, Barrott sold his minimoog and the couple moved to Ibiza in October 2012, given that "We wanted to live as best we could without possessions" and he wanted to live closer to his parents in England who were becoming very old.[1][5][8] He began making balearic downtempo recordings when he moved to Ibiza. He reasoned that "Anything over 110bpm sounds like gabba to me so, over the years, I guess I naturally gravitated to slow music and Balearic, cos it means I can do anything I want as a musician and a label owner.”[6] His first studio album to be released under the Mark Barrott moniker, Sketches from an Island, is based on the quiet nature of Ibiza, using Leonardo da Vinci's technique of "Sophistication through simplicity" to represent this concept.[1] In 2014, he stated that he was unwilling to release music from other artists on his label, and preferred to make his own content for the imprint at the moment: "when you're releasing other people's music and they deliver it late or they don't like the artwork, and they have expectations because the last track sold 2,000… you get to the point where you'd just rather be responsible for yourself."[3]

Barrott has done mixes and playlists for magazines and radio shows such as Beats in Space,[9] Electronic Beats,[10] The Fader,[11] Thump[12] and Crack Magazine.[13]

By July 2014, International Feel had sold more than 100,000 records.[6]

Artistry

Barrott uses very little equipment to create his music; he reasoned that with this fact, he makes a challenge for himself to make "clever workarounds" with the limitations of the production utilities he works with, therefore leading to more creative content: '"When I'm writing a song I'm trying to tell a story - it's a narrative - but the actual parts that make up the plotline have a very simple ethos now, i.e. don't overload people with information."[3] Despite piano training from the first to the eighth grade, he said in 2014 that he has a small setup including a three-octave mini-keyboard.[3] He also doesn't listen to a lot of music from other artists, saying that he would lose original ideas if he did.[3]

Barrott stated in a March 2016 interview:

music is about having a blank page and going forward. If I was to go and make a track this very minute, and I wanted some cricket noises at night, I can tell you now I’d still probably want to go out and record some new ones.[1]

Discography

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
As Future Loop Foundation
As Mark Barrott

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Cooper, Duncan (9 March 2016). "Making Chill Music On An Island Is Just As Amazing As You’d Imagine". The Fader. Retrieved 25 July 2016.
  2. 1 2 "Fifteen Questions Interview with Mark Barrott". Fifteen Questions. p.1. Retrieved 26 July 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Boorman, Mike (2014). "International Feel: Banter from an Island". The Ransom Note. The Culture Space. Retrieved 26 July 2016.
  4. 1 2 Beta, Andy (24 July 2014). "Electric Fling: Sketches from Ibiza Island". Pitchfork Media. Conde Nast. Retrieved 17 June 2015.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Lutz, Michael (20 October 2012). "Mr. International: An interview with International Feel founder Mark Barrott". Electronic Beats. T-Mobile. Retrieved 26 July 2016.
  6. 1 2 3 Schlichting, Lars (9 July 2014). "Mark Barrott: Notes from a Small Island". DJ Magazine. Thrust Publishing Ltd. Retrieved 26 July 2016.
  7. ↑ P. Ferguson, Joshua (21 July 2014). "Exclusive Mark Barrott Interview". Dialogue Incorporated. Retrieved 26 July 2016.
  8. ↑ Reynaldo, Shawn (28 June 2016). "Mark Barrott’s Love For Ibiza Is A Spiritual One". Red Bull Music Academy. Retrieved 26 July 2016.
  9. ↑ "BIS Radio Show #738". Beats in Space. Retrieved 27 July 2016.
  10. ↑ Brailey, Louise (23 June 2014). "Mark Barrott's ultimate Balearic playlist". Electronic Beats. Retrieved 27 July 2016.
  11. ↑ Cooper, Duncan (28 June 2016). "FADER Mix: Mark Barrott". The Fader. Retrieved 27 July 2016.
  12. ↑ Barrott, Mark (30 June 2016). "Bliss Out with Mark Barrott's Past, Present, and Future of Balearic Playlist". Thump. Vice Media. Retrieved 28 July 2016.
  13. ↑ "Mark B (International Feel)". Crack Magazine. Retrieved 27 July 2016.
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