Born under the Sagittarius sign, in Sicily, Italy, 1975, Misstress Barbara (spelled with 4"s" to understand 'miss' and 'stress') moved to Montreal at age 8, where she has lived ever since. She holds a degree in Communication Studies, specialized in Film, and obtained a license to fly gliders and Cessna airplanes at age 16. Her creative involvement with music began when she picked up the drums at age 12 and started playing in bands. For the next seven years she was absorbed by classic rock, by punk music, and all the hard music of the time.
In 1994 her musical interests shifted to electronic music. A year later she traded in her drum kit for two turntables and a mixer. In the spring of 1996, she got her first booking and hasn't looked back since; playing all the major cities from North to South America, Europe and Asia along with Australia. Misstress Barbara has played alongside the most respected artists such as Björk, Jeff Mills, Carl Cox, Masters at Work, Sven Väth, Tiesto and many others. Her various musical tastes have led her to play many important clubs worldwide like Twilo (NYC, USA), Velvet Underground (London, UK), Aria (Montreal, Canada), Florida 135 (Fraga, Spain), Rex (Paris, France), Zouk (Singapore), Aloca (Sao Paulo, Brazil), just to name a few. She is also quite a regular at the Godskitchen Events around the UK and in their Birmingham club Air. She has also played many big events like SONAR (Spain), AWAKENINGS (Holland), I LOVE TECHNO (Belgium), MONEGROS (Spain), and one of her highlights from the beginnings of her DJ career was playing at "Fashion Cares" in Toronto; a 5000 people AIDS-Benefit fashion show party, hosted by K.D. Lang and Rupaul.
She likes to describe her main style as "Drummy Funky Pumpin' Techno" and her most important musical influences come from the shuffling of Jazz and from the repetitive grooves of Latin Music. Regardless of the influences, her typical hard beats have always been the driving force in her music and have always come first. These elements are immediately recognizable in her productions. She can be very different from one production to another, yet never lose the common threads between shifts in sound or style. This is also true for the records she chooses to play and how she builds her full-tilt nights.
Barbara began buying studio equipment shortly after the beginning of her DJ career and spent the next twelve months familiarizing herself with the equipment and working on original tracks without really finishing them. The real work started once she finished university and dedicated herself full time to a solid studio work.
She has created her very popular Techno label RELENTLESS MUSIC in 1999, which name had to be changed in the beginning of 2003 to avoid legal issues with another company holding the same name in the UK. This is when she created ITURNEM.
Barbara has also a weakness for House Music. For that, she has created the alias name of Barbara Brown, to be able to produce and play House Music without confusing her fans and the people who buy her Techno tunes. She plans on starting a House label, although this has been a pending plan since the beginning of her career and she will only get to this when she feels the time is right.
As a producer, Barbara has accomplished quite a lot. She has released records on some of the most respected Techno labels on the planet and she also had a few of her tracks licensed for films and videogames. In 2002, her very popular track 'Never Could Have Your Heart' has been licensed for the Play Station 2 videogame 'Midnight Club II'. She plans on doing more music for films, video games and radio oriented remixes and projects in the future, towards a more advanced stage of her Producer career.
Those are her plans so far, but be assured that this is only the tip of the iceberg for Barbara, as her future is looking very bright and her DJ schedule is heavilybooked up and constantly moving forward, as well as her studio work, which promises to bring us more of the cutting edge music she is very well known for.
We will see a lot more of Barbara in the decade of 2000 and beyond. |
