Like a feather in the wind or the global stock market, all of us are subject to stochastic drift. Originating in advanced statistics, the term refers to the way in which randomness works upon a system, how the trajectory of a line sways as it’s affected by unanticipated events. For Sam Barker, the metaphor of a winding path has been meaningful in recent years.

After an extended period as a label runner and concert booker, the Berlin-based musician entered the spotlight with 2018’s Debiasing EP and 2019’s Utility, two records that articulated a weightless, kick-drumless vision of techno. What should have been a dizzying ascent was cut short by the pandemic: tour cancelled, label shuttered, and hard-won contacts with booking agents broken off. At his lowest moment, the artist filled out paperwork at a job center and weighed leaving the music industry behind. “It was quite remarkable how the rug could be pulled from everything in such an all-encompassing way,” he reflected in an interview with Tone Glow. “This made it quite hard to engage in a rule-based or goal-based approach because it seemed like every goal was changing from one week to the next.”

Barker’s second LP, Stochastic Drift, is both a synthesis of his wilderness years and a thrilling inflection point. In a field of brilliant ambient techno producers, he’s delivered his most dazzling and definitive statement to date. The strict parameters that guided his early records’ zero-gravity rush have dissolved into freeform experimentation, allowing his tracks to billow and burst as the mood demands. Across the album, Barker blurs analog and mechanized instruments into gauzy clouds, jazzy ambiance, and elegant percussion. He navigates extremes, toggling between aural chaos and hyper-mediated technology by harnessing randomness for all its power.

On early solo releases, Barker committed himself to restricting his own talent with an intensity that would make Brian Eno blush. In interviews, he could occasionally sound like a level-headed startup founder, phrasing his ideas in terms of inputs and outputs and making a cool yet impassioned case for techno disruption. The difference was that Barker was concerned with scrambling expectations rather than optimizing outcomes. Taking inspiration from engineering, probability theory, and social psychology (and titling most tracks after related concepts), he set applied sciences to a dancefloor pulse. The continually cresting trance of “Hedonic Treadmill” or “When Prophecy Fails” was a product of limitation, ingeniously making up for the tracks’ lack of thump with pillowy texture, glassy melodies, and ceaseless forward motion.

Barker wields a similar palette of icy synths on Stochastic Drift, but the record diverges in how he applies them to its canvas. The constantly shifting, knife-point fineness Barker honed on Utility has been compared to the “pointillist trance” of Lorenzo Senni. On Stochastic Drift, instead of clustering rave stabs into the shape of an off-kilter dance track, his approach is open and airy. The more fitting fine-arts comparison is Cy Twombly: that of an artist carving a vast horizon from a frenzy of subtle and streaky mark-making. Lead single “Reframing,” the only track here with a drop, hews closest to a trance blueprint. Even then it’s far from conventional. Barker withholds payoff for several beats past the song’s peak and when it finally detonates, it sings rather than explodes. His mastery of the stereo field is remarkable, milking the resonance out of each fleck and dash that crosses the mix.

Where he once leveraged the forward thrust of trance to nudge his songs into gear, Barker now allows them to gradually assume their own shapes. Repetition that first scans as monotonous gradually becomes mesmerizing as stray sounds cohere into brilliantly busy compositions. On “Force of Habit” and “Difference and Repetition,” he sets distended synth loops rolling into motion, cycling through phasing as scattered drums and flashing keys highlight distinct parts of the curvature. With their initially awkward gait, these songs can occasionally resemble the lurching vaporwave of Giant Claw or early Oneohtrix Point Never, although Barker’s ear for smoothness means that they merely sigh rather than gasp.

He reaps the greatest rewards of his newly loosened style in the album’s final stretch. “Fluid Mechanics” definitively adds “jazz musician” to the producer’s repertoire as Barker structures the interplay between understated drums and slanted synths with a stern but twinkling piano. Each time its melody rounds the bend, the underlying music surges to the fore with tidal intensity, leaving a sea spray of dubby reverb in its wake. The closing title track is structured around a virtuoso programmed drum solo that blurs the distinction between man and machine in a fistfight of roiling toms. It is the most obvious instance of Barker’s use of (handmade) mechanized instruments, and also his most inspiring. By situating his art in a language of scientific and mechanical processes, Barker highlights his own human capacities: The record’s complexity is a counterpoint to the thoughtlessness of AI generation, pairing extraordinary musicianship with the creative agency required to make the most of automation.

Barker would probably balk at mapping biography too closely onto his music. But despite their technical bent, many of his titles can be read as analogies for personal growth amid emotional duress. In this light, the staggered pulse of “Difference and Repetition” and “Force of Habit” reflect a brain stumbling over itself in real time, while the lucid, chiseled climaxes of “Positive Disintegration” and “Reframing” could be understood as hard-won revelations. In a press release accompanying the album, Barker cited scholar and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of “antifragility” as a source of inspiration. To be antifragile is to benefit from chaos, to thrive on adversity, and grow in proportion to your experience. Stochastic Drift is the sound of an artist and his work fracturing again and again, becoming more durable every time.