Misstress Barbara Trades In Techno For New Style

Misstress Barbara was once in the air cadets, can fly airplanes and got her start in music by drumming in a punk band. These days, she's almost always behind turntables in crowded clubs. But that doesn't mean that the Italian-born, Montreal-bred DJ shies away from risk.

Barbara freely admits that her newest mix CD, Come With Me..., is taking her on one of the biggest challenges of her decade-long career. That's because it's a soft electro-minimal album and, therefore, far from her signature hard techno style.

"I'm just changing because this is where I want to go right now, this is the music that excites me right now. Hard techno has been exciting me for 10 years, now it's this.

"So now I'm changing and I would actually say that it's a very courageous move because, although I've been in a really underground scene, I had a name in hard techno and that's it. My name was done. And it took me a long time, it took me 10 years, to get to a respected point with techno music. And now I can just feed off that popularity and just play and have a blast and not have to make any more efforts because I'm established. But the thing is that I don't mind efforts. I actually like efforts and I like challenge."

Once Barbara decided on her new direction, she took two months to mix her album. It includes two of her new songs and contributions from 15 different DJs, including Trentemoller and Sebo K. The process of mixing in front of a plain studio wall instead of a club full of people wasn't easy for Barbara, but she made it work.

"It's all really perfectly mixed and it goes through the story, from the beginning to the end. It's not like up and down and up and down in the energy, it's like constantly building, building, building until a certain point, a peak, and then it comes down to announce the end of the CD. So I think it's definitely a journey. It's a journey that, when I play three, four, five hours, that's what I do with people in the crowd. But I've managed doing it in an hour, which is extremely difficult."

Barbara is currently on a world tour to promote the CD and says most of her fans have reacted well to the new music. But the person she most wants to keep happy is herself.

"If this music doesn't do it for me anymore and another type of music does, then I don't mind if I have to start all over again, like a new career," Barbara says.

"It's probably going to take me another 10 years to have the respect I would like to have in this style. But if this is what's going to happen, then that's fine."

Misstress Barbara plays Ottawa's Helsinki on February 25.