Mark Barrott

A chat with the musician/ producer on grief and loss in Ibiza, going off-grid, and the illusion of Hollywood moments

Ten years ago, I found myself in Spain in the summer of 2014 and decided to hop over to Ibiza. No, not really for a night of decadence and clubbing until midday tomorrow. Instead, the trek I took over to “The White Island” was –as I wrote at the time– “one of blissed-out quietude and relaxation. It will be the one that seems most like a dream when I try to explain it to incredulous friends back home.” I went over to hang out with Mark Barrott, a musician who started the International Feel label and had the good sense to put out records featuring DJ Harvey, Todd Terje, Quiet Village, and the like. As I wrote at the time:

I would say Balearic was having a moment, but that would imply it went away, when in fact Balearic came and never left. It may be overshadowed by billboards of current trends, but the spirit remains intact. Balearic can mean many things to many people. To an American who has never ventured to these storied islands, it might mean a certain type of featherweight dance music that can’t seem decide if it’s synth pop, faux reggae, lounge, ambient, lite jazz, or acid house. But to those who have tasted the fruit of Ibiza, Balearic gloriously means all of the above.

I spent a weekend with Mark and his lovely wife, Sara. Sara was most hospitable, making us a lovely vegan meal one night and explaining to me that aside from clubbing, Ibiza was also a hotspot for detoxing, ayurvedic massages, and organic meals. She was most helpful when I wrote a piece in NYT years later about Ibiza off-season. We stayed in touch over the years. Barrott asked me to contribute notes to a sweet compilation of Balearic music and I was happy to oblige.

In early 2023, Mark reached out to me to deliver the sad news that Sara had been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer that had rapidly spread. In the span of three months, she was gone. Barrott made the difficult decision to pack up the house in Ibiza and move to the mainland.

These days, he’s living off-the-grid in the mountains between Barcelona and Valencia, where he tends to six cats in a house he recently renovated on a friend’s property. It runs on solar power, well water, Starlink internet, composting toilets, wood stove for heat in the winter. It’s extreme living, as he reminds me. He’s grateful to have avoided the worst of the recent flooding and mudslides in the region.

This month, he will release Everything Changes, Nothing Ends, an ambitious and deeply personal album that doubles as a meditation and tribute to the spirit of his late wife. It finds the producer fusing his keen melodic sense to bold orchestration and chorale arrangements. Recent work like 蒸発 (J​ō​hatsu) explored more cinematic terrain and Everything Changes is a step towards the more ambitious realms of film soundtracks. We spent a few weeks trading questions and voice memos back and forth.

So when did you and Sara learn her diagnosis?

It was about this time two years ago that she got sick. And going into October of that year, we both had flu. And it was a particularly vicious flu. I got better after about 10 days, and she didn't get better. Which was very strange, because she was the fittest person in my universe. She was an ex-fitness instructor and she didn't get better and during October, I also noticed that when she was walking from the bed to the bathroom for example she was actually dragging her right foot. And I asked her about it and she shrugged it off and basically said, “Oh, it's because I've been in bed for a couple of weeks. It's nothing.”

I found a private doctor and asked him to visit the house just to check her out and maybe do some blood tests. And a few minutes before he was due to arrive, she wanted to freshen herself up and on the way to the bathroom, she collapsed on the floor like she lost control of her limbs. She started speaking gobbledygook, she was trying to make sentences and the words were jumbled and coming out in the wrong order. And so my initial thought was she's having a stroke. And so I got her out of the bathroom. She was aware of what was going on and, but couldn’t really process it.

So she’s in the hospital. And the next morning the phone rang and they'd done a full body scan, a CAT scan, and an MRI and it was in that moment that your life kind of changes forever. Basically they said “Sara's got breast cancer.” And then at the same time, there's a part of my brain going “But that doesn't explain the neurological symptoms that I saw yesterday.” And the next words out of their mouth is: “She's got breast cancer and it's already spread to her brain.” And that is when the “pin drops in the room moment” where life kind of changes forever.

Was it even humanly possible to work on music during that time?

Yes, it was. But in a way, no, it wasn't. So Sara came home after the initial prognosis. They give brain cancer patients generally a huge dose of steroids to reduce the swelling. And life went back to normal, but not really normal. I knew that it would never be normal again. And so we had this month, most of November at home and then in December we knew –or I knew at least– that the steroids effect would start to wear off and the swelling would happen again and she started to have seizures so come December she went back into hospital and she spent most of the time from December to her death at the end of January in hospital, albeit she was home for two to three weeks over Christmas and into early January. Lots of people were visiting her from Germany and her friends from Berlin from the old days and her dad was coming and so I would come home in the evening and you know it's the typical kind of depressing situation. It's cold because it's winter. And in winter in Ibiza is lots of humidity. And the house is cold and it's silent and it feels a bit damp. So you come in and you'd make a fire and you cook for yourself and you don't know what to do.

So what I started doing during that time was was writing in the evenings after being spent in the days in hospital. It was mainly it was very melancholic music and it was mainly on piano. Looking back now it was more therapy. I wasn't writing with anything in mind, I was writing because it was a distraction and a method of gaining presence as opposed to sitting there twiddling my thumbs, thinking inevitable, yet hugely depressing thoughts.

So Sara then died at the end of January. And I can't really remember February. I remember watching the Ricky Gervais series, Afterlife, which was about a guy whose wife had died of cancer. I watched all three series of that. February is a blur. It's just one of those pieces of missing time. Towards Easter, I started to listen to what I'd done over the winter, the making music for therapy, if you want to call it that. A lot of it was was rubbish.

Then the weather started to get a little brighter you know I realized very early on after Sara died if you stay moping in bed, nothing's going to get done, nobody's going to feed the cats, nobody's going to feed you, nobody's going to make a cup of tea for you, nobody's going to do the shopping. You've got to get out you've got to get moving and and I was quite brutal with myself because I could see two roads and one of them I didn't want to walk down and I occasionally did walk down it and occasionally still do walk down it and it's not a great road to walk down. I'm thankfully mentally disciplined and determined and stable enough that I'm able to avoid that road 99% of the time.

So I started writing again. I started with “Pandora,” which is the opening track. It started with an electronic arpeggio on an Arturia synthesizer. Somehow I have no memory of this, like I've no memory of that February, no memory of the four weeks after she died. I have no memory of how I went from an electric arpeggio into orchestras and choirs but as soon as I did go into that, it felt like the right energy, the right sound, the right sonic language to portray the emotions that I wanted to work on. Very soon one track becomes two, two becomes three, three becomes four, then you're halfway through an album and a theme emerges. Then it becomes an album rather than just a series of tracks in your mind. And I knew that what I was doing then was writing about those 11 weeks from her diagnosis to death. It happened very, very, very, very quickly, that record.

You know, I'm on my own, I'm having to build systems to manage daily life with myself. My father also got very sick and I had to have him emergency admitted to a care home only two months after Sara died. So I'm managing that situation, too.

I also then decided to move and leave Ibiza in the summer and so I'm now renovating a house in the mountains in the mainland between Barcelona and Valencia. That's an off-the-grid house, so I'm looking after all these projects. Somehow between April and August of 2023, I renovated a house, prepared a move, looked after my father, looked after myself, looked after six cats, and finished an album.

Was there any music you and Sara would listen to in those last few months?

It's never like it's in the movies. Somebody dying is never like it is in the movies. There was no Hollywood moment. There was no Sara sitting down going, “Look, I'm dying, I want to tell you this, that, this, that.” I don't think she could process it. She acknowledged that she had breast cancer but she would never never say “I've got brain cancer as well.” She would just say “there's something wrong with my head.” I don't think her body would process or could process that amount of trauma. In the end, she died in the same month of the same cancer at the same age as her mother.

The last words Sara ever said to me was “Why are you eating my cheesecake?” It was three-four days before she died, then they had to put her into an induced coma. It wasn't like these tender moments with soft focus and slow-mo and you're fighting fires every day. I could already see my father going down at the hill at this point, so I'm fighting that fire. I'm trying to look after Sara and all the treatments and the holistic stuff she was trying to do to get better. And it is a daily task of firefighting, not a daily task of Hollywood moments.

And so you try and get some time together. But this is what the title on the album, Butterfly in a Jar, is about: it's impossible. You're at doctor's appointments; you're in hospital; you're having a scan; you're having blood tests; you're having a transfusion. I’ve got 24 hour a day care in the home, so you get very very little time alone. The irony is what Sara did listen to herself a lot in those months was mainly my music. Which is hilarious, because she was totally outside of my music world and she didn't really like music. It wasn't her thing. She loved some pop stuff and she came out of the 90’s party scene in England –Sara was part of a very big underground rave collective in London in the ‘90s– so she certainly loved music a lot. But it wasn’t a big “together” thing in our lives.

And it was really strange to me –telling you the story now– that all she did in those 11 weeks was listen to my music on YouTube. And that’s really all she wanted. Normally, if she was stressed or ill, she would listen to my music, which sounds slightly strange now in hindsight, but that is what it is.

You utilize orchestra and choir here, which is new for you. At what point did you realize that's what was needed in the piece?

The whole sonic language of the album becoming orchestral and choral was completely weird. Normally, I have a very good memory of how I get to a finished track. I find as I get older, the ideas come with less frequency, so it’s good for me to have a muscle memory for how I started a track. Sometimes that in itself can be a starting point. What I do remember was that when I started writing around Easter time, I started with an electronic arpeggio and I have literally no recollection how I went from that to orchestra and choir. I have no memory. For the life of me, I can’t summon to mind how that happened. How did I even think about a choir? Once I did, I immediately knew it was the right sonic language to portray those emotions.

When we make music, most times we’re doing it to explain to ourselves the feelings that we can’t explain in words. The sonic landscape becomes our mechanism of communication. What I did know was that as soon as I got to that point, I knew it was absolutely the right thing. It opened the full door.

That whole period was crazy. I was adapting to living on my own, looking after six cats, doing all the mundane stuff like supermarket shopping. From April to August, I finished the whole album and the whole house move to the mainland and had a solar system built there. It was a really productive period. “Pandora” felt so right that everything just flowed. Once I decided it would feature orchestral stuff, it happened quickly.

How did you sort choir/ orchestra off-grid in the Catalan Mountains?

The album was actually finished in Ibiza before I moved to the mainland. Sara had a very good friend she met at a famous squat called K77 in Berlin, Kastanienallee in Prenzlauer Berg. He’s a violinist and he spent Christmas with us while Sara was very close to death. Once I knew I was going to be using orchestras, I contacted him and he was very keen to help. He’s very well connected to the classical scene in Germany and he pulled together a pseudo orchestra when we needed it. I would go over on long weekends and he would get all his friends: strings, woodwinds, brass, and an orchestrator and they all worked “off the books” as a fun project on the weekends. That’s why no one is credited. Rather than a full string orchestra, we would record eight players and layer them into a full symphonic section.

When you listen now, what moment on the album reminds you most of Sara?

It’s in “Butterfly in a Jar 1.” It’s at 3:07-3:18 and it’s this reprised horn line. I don’t know what it is, but when I play it, it rips my heart asunder. That melody just reminds me of the very essence of Sara and who she was and what she stood for. It’s a representation of her spirit and soul. What do I imagine her response to be? Well, she hated a fuss. She hated a fuss, but loved being the center of attention, because she was a gregarious person. She would be very touched and chuckling away that there’s a record out there about her.