Todd Barton

Todd Barton is an composer, sound designer, multimedia performer, analog synthesist specializing in Buchla Electronic Musical Instruments As well as the writer Ursula K. Le Guin, Todd has collaborated with musicians like Kronos Quartet, Anthony Braxton and Zakir Hussein.

For his collaboration with Le Guin, Barton based his compsitions on the numbers four and five, as they were seen as guiding forces in Kesh culture. What Barton created was a music based on “interlocking spirals … [of] alternating fives and fours, or fives and fives”. Barton spent time listening to the Californian landscape for natural cues that would fit this new structure. A line from ‘Always Coming Home’ tells us that the structure of the Kesh music “served as a subject of meditation and as an inexhaustible metaphor”. Le Guin’s writing and music still serve as a deep well of inspiration, learning and communication for a new generation of readers and listeners.