Seismo

Description

A blend of rebellious queer vocal fragments, deceptive percussion, and hammered vibrations, upsammy and Valentina Magaletti's first collaboration pulses with anticipation. The genesis of Seismo began with a commission from Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, which sought to create the soundtrack for an exhibition at Rotterdam's Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. The duo did not want to approach this collaboration lightly. Traversing the museum's labyrinthine halls, they recorded various improvised percussive sounds with their arsenal of microphones, using the space to nurture rhythms and textures that were then sculpted into electroacoustic vignettes. This was merely the starting point, however. As they performed together, the project evolved and Seismo took shape. The duo had found a striking aesthetic concept, primarily using digital and acoustic percussion instruments to blur the lines between their roles and create a tension between the synthetic and the authentic. The final album is a phantasmagorical interplay of tension between its conflicting elements: harmony and dissonance, random and predictable, openness and constraint. Seismo is not upsammy's first experience observing her surroundings for revelation. On her acclaimed second album, Germ in a Population of Buildings (2024), the Amsterdam-based DJ, producer, and multidisciplinary artist constructed her complex, atypical rhythms and strange melodies around a modernist structure of field recordings collected from various urban landscapes, contrasting powerful bass lines with subtle, microscopic sonorities. Meanwhile, London-based Italian avant-garde artist Magaletti has applied her unique logic to countless projects, collaborating with artists as diverse as batida icon Nídia, hardcore-dub band Moin, French writer Fanny Chiarello, and British bass savant Shackleton. For years, she has approached drumming with a critical eye, seeking to deconstruct received ideas, an approach particularly visible in A Queer Anthology of Drums (2020). The two artists' nuanced perspectives blend harmoniously in Seismo, a dizzying suite of eight eccentric statements, both fragile and assertive, ethereal and precise. Seismo is an album that feeds on the energy generated by its juxtapositions: tension and anticipation dissipated by fast, hyperactive movements, and finely crafted rhythms disturbed by a layer of indistinct, barely perceptible microsounds. It is a collaboration that feels like two minds challenging each other without clashing, each observing from their unique vantage point and imagining a third landscape shaped by optimistic and queer vibrations.