The title “Distant Storms at Sea,” from Mark Barrott’s 2016 album Sketches From an Island 2, felt like a subtle joke. Inclement weather could never breach the paradise Barrott conjured in his music, an almost-too-perfect island fantasy alive with avian and simian chatter, apparently inspired by his everyday life on Ibiza. (He’s now living in mainland Spain, off the grid somewhere in the mountains between Barcelona and Valencia.) A shift began with 2022’s Jōhatsu, rooted in a score he wrote for a documentary about Japan’s missing persons, and more mournful than anything he’d made before. It was easy to assume the film’s heavy subject required the composer to shift gears slightly, that this was a one-off and we’d soon be back in Balearicland. Yet Barrott’s new album Everything Changes, Nothing Ends is his most tempestuous release, filled with urgent kettledrums and churning strings, as if those distant storms have made sudden landfall.
This time, Barrott’s music reflects a personal tragedy—the loss of his longtime partner, Sara, who passed last year. It’s as if Barrott made a pact with himself that he wasn’t going to write about the sun and the sea this time around, pushing the hand drums and wah-wah guitars aside to lean into grand orchestral pomp and ambient shimmer. The music has a blocky, oblong quality: The choir on “Pandora” and “January 25th” barks out clipped, staccato phrases, and the strings play either in rigid eighth notes or sylphlike glissandos. Everything Changes has less to do with Barrott’s previous work than with one of the unheralded masterpieces of Balearic music: Valencian composer Pep Llopis’s 1987 album Poiemusia la Nau dels Argonautes, which implied that a place with as much human and natural history as the Mediterranean coast must be a little bit haunted.
Everything Changes runs 42 minutes, about average for Barrott, but it feels shorter because of how much more happens on the first side. Opener “Pandora” pivots from almost martial bluster to sublime Rhodes ruminations. The “Butterfly in a Jar” suite follows, commencing with string swells worthy of some Homeric epithet like “rosy-fingered,” then taking a left turn into the kind of slow-burning digital jazz Biosphere explored on Dropsonde. The tracks on the second side, meanwhile, are pure pools of ambient, with the strings rarely rising above a flutter. Because the titles (“It’s Just Like Falling Asleep,” “The Light Is Still There”) concern themselves explicitly with mourning and death, one can easily read Everything Changes as a chronological travelogue of Barrott’s relationship with his late partner—the earlier tracks burning with the fierceness of the life they shared, the later tracks conjuring sleepless nights and fading apparitions.
