[1] He learnt classical piano from the age of seven, later becoming obsessed with the electric guitar after hearing the album Jimi Hendrix Band of Gypsys as a teenager.
[4] Postgraduate studies in composition and musicology were with Ann Ghandar, Gerald Florian Messner [de], Richard Toop and Greg Schiemer.
[25][26] An early work, Rota (1981) for piano trio, is clearly influenced by twentieth century Italian music, specifically Franco Donatoni.
[32] Subsequent works, such as Cabaret for orchestra, Blues for bass clarinet and percussion (based on a Charlie Parker riff), Disco for percussion quartet, Red for recorder (based on Jimi Hendrix’s Red House) and Smoky for harpsichord, developed Barkl’s jazz-inspired instrumental style[33][34] until a complete change emerged with a series of lengthy electronic works composed using the open source patching language Pure Data.
[35] These used large banks of computer generated oscillators to build thick textures of sine waves, saturating the aural space.