By day, Marc Barreca serves as a bankruptcy judge in Seattle, a job he’s held since 2010. By night, he creates fascinating experimental-electronic music. It’s a weird and unique dichotomy, but Barreca treats the situation as if it’s no big deal, even while admitting in an interview at his West Seattle studio that these “worlds don’t intersect even a little bit, so it’s an odd set of affairs.”
Few of Barreca’s coworkers know about his musical activities. He senses that they just wouldn’t get it, and his personality prohibits him from blabbing, though there’s no law forbidding him to speak of it, as long as he doesn’t promote himself from the bench. “I’ve scoured the canons of judicial ethics,” Barreca says, “and I saw nothing in there about electronic music, as long as I promise not to make any money at it… which is assured.”
