The first time I listened to Loner, my apartment seemed to grow gills, opened in the walls, breathing in rhythm with Joshua Mainne’s synthesizers. By the third track, “Kilmpton,” I was living underwater, watching my furniture float past like confused sea creatures who’d forgotten how to swim. This is what Barry Can’t Swim does: he turns your listening space into an aquarium where the fish are all your discarded memories, circling endlessly while you press your face against the glass from the inside.
The opening siren of “The Person You’d Like To Be” doesn’t warn you of danger; it’s the sound of your reflection trying to escape the mirror. Each beat is a heartbeat borrowed from someone you’ll never meet, played back at the exact moment you realize you’ve been holding your breath since childhood. Mainne has perfected the art of making electronic music that feels like it was recorded inside a lonely snow globe, with all of us tiny figures trapped in perpetual, beautiful suspension.
What’s most unnerving about Loner is how it makes solitude feel crowded. Every empty space in the mix is populated by the shadows of sounds that could have been there, creating a ghostly orchestra of absence. The silence between beats contains entire conversations you had with yourself at 3 AM, digitized and fed back through speakers that might actually be your own ears turned inside out. I saw Barry Can’t Swim live at Osheaga, and I’m still living in the flashbacks.
