In the Round: upsammy & Valentina Magaletti + Anton Pearson

upsammy & Valentina Magaletti present their new collaboration as part of our in the round series in June. Support from Anton Pearson (Squid).

A shiver of mischievous vocal snippets, disorienting rhythms and collapsing sonic architectures, upsammy and Valentina Magaletti’s first collaborative album prioritizes motion, modulation and variance. 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.

Anton Pearson is best known as one of the guitarists in respected post-punk outfit Squid. On his debut solo album Driving Through Belgium, Pearson leans into atmosphere, texture and space. It is ambient in spirit, adjacent to contemporary classical in feeling, but composed less with notes in mind than with sound itself.

Supported by d&b audiotechnik.