Barton is an auteur of disco — a medium not just for sound, but for communion. Berlin-based. Composer, producer, performer — every element of The Afterlife is his. He brings both reverence and risk to the studio, treating classic pop as material for resurrection. His work honours disco's pre-commercial origins as cultural resistance while extending its future as social medicine — a place where joy is present, grief is metabolised, and the dancefloor becomes transformative space.

The Afterlife is his most comprehensive statement: thirteen tracks, three movements, a single proposition that love holds while circumstances change. Across the album, songs by Neil Young, Grace Jones, Laura Branigan, Patrick Cowley, TLC, The Normal, Roberta Flack, Roxette, Madleen Kane, and Róisín Murphy are reimagined as hypnotic dancefloor experiences — disco as spiritual architecture, songs that move bodies while quietly remaking souls.

"The afterlife is not where we go once something is over," Barton says. "It is the mode in which we keep loving when, by all ordinary measures, we should have stopped."

He does not court attention. He builds worlds. The Afterlife is one of them.