Richard Barrett (1959, Swansea, Wales) is internationally active as both composer and improvising performer, and has collaborated with many leading performers in both areas, while developing works and ideas which increasingly leave behind the distinctions between them. His long-term collaborations include the electronic duo FURT which he formed with Paul Obermayer in 1986, composing for and performing with the ELISION contemporary music group since 1990, and regular appearances with the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble since 2003. Recent larger projects include „CONSTRUCTION”, a two-hour work for twenty-three performers and three-dimensional sound system, and „world-line” for electric lap steel guitar and ensemble, both composed for ELISION. He is currently working on a new evening-length project close-up, a collaboration with Ensemble Studio6 of Belgrade, where he has been based since the end of 2013. He studied composition principally with Peter Wiegold, and currently teaches at the Institute of Sonology at The Hague, having previously held a professorship at Brunel University in London.

trace was written in 1994 for a project devised by the composer Ron Ford, involving diatonic music boxes made for the museum of mechanical musical instruments in Utrecht. It was composed directly onto punched cards which are fed into the two boxes.