THE PRODUCER / FACUNDO BARRERA
A musician’s ear.
An engineer’s mind.
Thirty years of making music. Twenty-two years in infrastructure and production systems. Rhyme Cafe is where those two paths meet.
Facundo Barrera is an Argentine musician and systems engineer based in Luxembourg. Self-taught on drums, guitar and bass, he is also a vocalist, composer, producer and arranger. His latest project brings that musical experience into a studio he helped build, using local AI on his own hardware.
01 / THE MUSICIAN
It began with
a drum kit.
At fifteen, he got his first drums and taught himself to play. RompeKbezaS, formed with two friends from school, became his first band. Its two albums were recorded live in the studio, without a metronome.
At seventeen, watching other guitarists opened another door. He learned the basics, bought a guitar and kept going. In Argentina, he played drums in PerfectSin, drums and vocals in MILF, and guitar and vocals in the covers band VELVET. Singing led to songwriting and the early Libertador recordings.
After moving to Luxembourg in 2013, he developed LastDays with an acoustic guitar. That material became part of BigDistraction, his solo archive of songs, covers and rarities.
For Life, recorded in May 2019, he wrote the music and lyrics, produced the songs, sang every vocal and played every instrument on separate tracks in a professional studio. Fundamental, recorded in January 2020, stripped the process back to live acoustic takes without a click. He also took part in the final mixing, and in Life’s mastering.
Explore the musical archive ↗02 / THE ENGINEER
Built to work.
Shaped by listening.
His professional background spans infrastructure, platforms, DevOps, security and production operations. Since 2026, he has been applying that experience to self-hosted AI: building applications, connecting models and running them on his own machines.
That experience matters here. A musical idea needs a practical route from concept to sound. He designed Musicshoot’s architecture, shaped its interface and worked through repeated rounds of implementation with a frontier model. Each listening session helped reveal what the system needed next.
The technical work made iteration possible. His musical experience gave those iterations a purpose: a bass line with space, a voice that sits inside the groove, an arrangement that develops, an ending that feels right.
03 / THE ARTIST
A new way
to compose.
Soul, funk and hip hop were outside his usual playing and listening. Rhyme Cafe gave him a way to explore those sounds and build a musical world around them.
Every record began with his concept. He directed the band identity, album names, track titles and order, main lyrical lines, sound, arrangements and final selection of takes. He advised on mixing and mastering, designed the album artwork with a local image model, and designed the website.
Mike, Rooney and the other members are fictional characters. Their Brooklyn story gives the band a world of its own. The records themselves come from a real musician’s sustained direction, listening and production work in Luxembourg.