upsammy & Valentina Magaletti: Seismo LP

A cocktail of rebellious queer vocal fragments, deceptive percussive granules, and swaying hammered vibrations, upsammy and Valentina Magaletti's first collaboration trembles with suspense. The seeds of "Seismo" were sown following a commission from Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum to soundtrack an exhibition of work from the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam and the duo didn't want to approach their collaboration flippantly. So, wandering the museum's maze of rooms, they recorded various improvised percussive sounds with their arsenal of microphones, using the space to inform various rhythms and textures that were sculpted later into electroacoustic vignettes. This was just the starting point, though; as Magaletti and upsammy began performing together, the project evolved and "Seismo" began to take shape. The duo had struck on a salient aesthetic concept, using mostly digital and acoustic mallet instruments to blur the boundary between their roles and create friction between the synthetic and the authentic. And the finished record is a phantasmagoric push-and-pull between its various conflicting elements: harmony and dissonance, randomness and predictability, openness and constraint. It's a collaboration that sounds like two minds challenging each other but not wrestling, each peering from their own distinct vantage point and imagining a third landscape shaped by optimistic, queer vibrations.