Five Questions for Barometric, the Duo Turning Weather Data Into Techno

Barometric are two people, two rooftop weather stations and one rule. Ines Aalto lives outside Helsinki; Marta Reis lives in Porto; the stations sit on a garage and a fifth-floor terrace respectively and send a reading every ten seconds. Their debut, 'Isobar', released in July on Basement Records, is nine tracks and nine days of weather, unedited in the ways that count. We sent them five questions before their October dates and got answers long enough to need a haircut. Here they are, mostly intact.

One. The two roofs

Where does the data actually come from, and how much of it is real?

Reis: All of it is real, which is a boring answer, so let me make it complicated. There are two stations. Mine is on a terrace in Porto, forty euros of sensors in a plastic housing my neighbour thinks is a security camera. Ines has one on her mother's garage roof, which is a worse site, meteorologically speaking, because there are trees. We take pressure, temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, and rainfall, every ten seconds, into a small computer in a lunchbox that pushes it to a server.

Aalto: The trees are not a bug. A professional would move the station and we are not professionals, we are two people with a hobby that got out of hand. What matters is that the numbers are observations, not forecasts. A forecast is somebody's opinion about the future and it is smooth. Observation is jagged. When the wind gusts, the number jumps, and you hear the jump. If we used forecast data the whole record would sound like an apology.

Two. The mapping

How exactly does a pressure reading become a sound?

Aalto: Three main routes, and they have not changed since 2023. Barometric pressure runs the filter: 975 hectopascals opens it to about nine kilohertz, 1040 closes it down to two hundred hertz. It is inverted on purpose, so a deep low pressure system, the kind that ruins a Tuesday, is bright and thin, and a big fat anticyclone is dark and heavy. Relative humidity runs delay feedback, thirty per cent for eight repeats' worth, saturated air for something close to self-oscillation. Wind speed runs tempo. Rain gates the hats, so a dry track has no top end at all.

Reis: The part people miss is that the mapping is not the composition. The clamps are. Deciding that wind maps to 118 up to 138 beats a minute and not to 60 up to 200, that is the whole job, and we argued about those two numbers for a month. Anybody can wire a sensor to a filter. Choosing what the extremes mean is where you find out whether you have taste. It is not so different from the people we met at that patch-and-share night in Seoul: the patch is public, the ranges are personal.

Three. The night nothing happened

What happens when the weather is boring?

Reis: July. A heatwave. We played a rooftop in Lisbon in front of maybe four hundred people, and the pressure sat at 1021 and did not move, and the wind was zero, absolutely zero, for the entire set. So the tempo stayed at 118 for forty minutes and the filter stayed shut and the whole thing was a slow, dark, closed room with no events in it.

Aalto: We have a rule, we call it the treaty, and it is very short: no hand touches a parameter the weather owns. Live, we can play notes, we can choose which patterns are running, we can stop. We cannot fake a gust. So I stood there and did nothing while about half the room left, which took about eleven minutes, and it was the worst eleven minutes of my professional life.

Reis: And then the other half stayed and it turned into the best set we have played. Because after twenty minutes everybody in that room understood that nothing was going to be given to them, and they stopped waiting for a drop. Somebody sent us a recording. We nearly put it out.

Four. The gimmick question

Is this not a gimmick with a spreadsheet attached? Why not just play the notes you want?

Aalto: It is a gimmick if the result is only interesting when you explain it. That is our test and we apply it honestly. Play 'Isobar' to somebody who knows nothing and if they say, why does this keep changing its mind, then it works, and if they say nothing, we have made a weather report.

Reis: The other half of the answer is that constraints are not decoration, they are a cure. Left alone I would write the same eight bars I have written since I was nineteen. The sky does not know what my favourite chord is. And there is an argument about honesty in there too. We mastered the album dynamically, on purpose, and the engineer, whose confessions you published last month, was the first person who did not ask us to make the quiet parts louder. Low pressure should be quiet. Otherwise what is the point.

Five. Where it stops

Where does this go next, and where do you refuse to take it?

Aalto: Next is other people's roofs. We want twenty stations, in twenty cities, and a set where the audience votes on which city we are hearing. There is a version of this that becomes a public instrument rather than a duo, and I think that is more interesting than a third album.

Reis: Where it stops is easy. In August a brand asked us to build a piece from hurricane data. Actual storm, actual coastline, people's actual roofs. The pitch deck used the word immersive. No. That is a real question and the answer is no, and we did not need a meeting about it.

Aalto: The weather is not content. It is the thing that happens to everybody at once, which is the only reason any of this is worth doing.