Born from a commission from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (for an exhibition built around prestigious works from the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam), Seism it could have taken the most obvious path: becoming a composed, atmospheric, illustrative work. Instead it does the opposite, energetically reactivating the border dialogue in which a certain research electronics meets art. The first album co-authored by Upsammy and Valentina Magaletti, released (not by chance) for the Berlin-based Pan, does not accompany a space, it undermines it. He does not seek a pacified synthesis between electronics and percussion, between digital and physical, control and instinct: he keeps their frictions open and transforms them into language.
On the one hand there is the Dutch Thessa Torsing, producer, DJ and multidisciplinary artist who has been working for years on irregular, mobile electronics, full of deviations. Already in Germ in a Population of Buildings two years ago he built crooked rhythms and oblique melodies starting from field recordings collected in different urban landscapes. On the other hand there is Valentina Magaletti, an Italian percussionist based in London, already at the center of a constellation of collaborations ranging from Thurston Moore to Moin, from Shackleton to Nicolás Jaar, always with an idea of rhythm that does not just accompany, but finds its versatility in the migration towards soundscapes in constant movement. Even when he starts from the drums, Magaletti tends to question their function, as shown in one of his most representative works, A Queer Anthology of Drums.
Together they have found a common ground that makes tension its habitat. The commission asked for a sound work for an exhibition that brought together masterpieces from the Boijmans collection, from Monet to Dalí, from Kusama to Picasso, Mondrian, Kiefer. Rather than responding directly to the paintings, however, the two choose to read the museum in its entirety: the rooms, the voids, the resonances, the very air of the space. Upsammy also had carte blanche on the possible collaboration of this work and, in that period, he had just seen Magaletti play in Amsterdam: «The proposal they made to me suggested more obvious things: a harpist, a pianist, organic and familiar sounds that you would expect in a museum. It seemed more interesting to me to do something percussive, the idea of recording drums, field recordings and percussion with Valentina inside the Rijksmuseum seemed much more alive to me.”
The first meeting between the two takes place practically close to the recordings: in the museum they collect percussive improvisations, resonances and accidents, leaving the space to suggest rhythms and textures. Seism it thus evolves in the exchange of files, ideas, in live improvisation where the commission is transformed into active language. On the topic of their understanding, Upsammy gets straight to the point: «I think that in music we both have the desire to mess things up a bit, to shake them up. This is also why the album is called Seism: it contains the idea of moving, making tremble.”
Magaletti follows it from another angle: «We were never afraid of dynamics, going from zero to one hundred wasn't a problem at all. Even when the sound may seem very surgical, very constructed, it was important for us that it had an impact.” And indeed Seism it works like this: it's a meticulous, millimetric record, but not at all cold. It gives priority to movement, to generative modulation, letting in every sonic detail to increase tension, not to demonstrate its intelligence. «It's a constant tension», underlines Magaletti. «It goes in one direction and then it doesn't go there anymore, it messes up the cards. Live you can hear a lot even in the audience's reaction: it's a sound that can be destabilizing, but that's why it's engaging.” A record that never seeks catharsis: it carries you forward by accumulation, by friction, by shocks.
Just listen to the beginning of It Comes to an End to understand where this sensation comes from: Magaletti's in situ improvisations open an ambiguous, almost unstable space, within which the microscopic glitches and bent melodies of Upsammy seem to appear from a different depth. In Superimposed the movement takes on a more propulsive form, but no more reassuring: the rhythm sways, hybridizes, fits between muffled strokes, alien voices, small slips. Hyperlocalizeinstead, he ties everything together with timbres that seem both piano-like and artificial, dry strokes that evaporate in the air, whispers and almost insectoid presences. It is a half hour that lives on these juxtapositions: harmony and dissonance, chance and control, openness and constriction, tactile presence and abstraction.
When trying to understand what they learned from each other, the best answer comes not so much in terms of influence, but of method. Upsammy describes herself as an artist who tends to construct sound with great precision: «Sometimes I almost feel like I'm designing the architecture of something». Of Magaletti, however, he admires «a more corporeal, almost instinctive approach». The percussionist replies: «For me it was nice to see how music can also be in a certain context without being just an immediate presence but thought, waiting, listening before intervention. Calvinism versus Catholicism,” he says, laughing.
The album holds up because neither of the two modes really wins over the other and the two seem to compete until a third soundscape emerges, in which friction and openness ultimately remain inseparable. Seism it refers precisely to the earthquake, to the vibration, to the wave movement: not only the shock, but also what records it, measures it, follows it over time. Upsammy insists on that idea of shakingof something that moves and puts tension. Magaletti completes the image: not only the initial impact, but also the second and third waves: the settling, the propagation.
When asked which song best captures the meaning of the project, it comes back to both Superimposedalbeit from different perspectives. Magaletti sees it as the point where you can best hear the breadth of the work, the way the record moves between different planes without losing coherence. Upsammy, on the other hand, also reads it as a conversation between worlds: that line that seems like a bass being played, but actually comes from a modular synthesizer, a small manifesto of the project.
At the end the discussion broadens. Not so much towards the eternal question of where experimental music is going, but what it means to make a record like this today, at a time when more and more artists are trying to make instruments, textures, presence and electronic treatment dialogue: «I don't want to say that electronics has exhausted everything it can do, but in certain cases I feel like I've seen how far it can go. Working with real instruments, with people who play them, for me brings back a more human, primordial component”, says Upsammy. He cites the Autechre as a kind of limiting point, the place where synthesis has gone so far that it seems almost non-human.
Magaletti also rejects any idea of music as a pattern, noting how this type of sound continues to have a listener who is not afraid of the risk, of the beyond, who asks for more: «I like to think that the audience for this music is the most curious», he says. «The one who comes home and brings with him something that challenged him».
And perhaps this is also why she, at a certain point, puts it down in the most concrete way possible: «It's not a record you put on while you wash the dishes, of course. You need to stay inside it, move in that spiral without necessarily waiting for it to bring you back to earth. It's a dense album, at times even demanding, but never truly conceptual. It does not resolve the distance between body and sound: it exposes it, tightens it, makes it vibrate.”
In an increasingly glossy and predictable sound present, the most radical gesture of electronic music of this type is not to offer consolation, but to make you vibrate with that physical and emotional shock that continues even after listening. Freeing the machine from the idea of perfection and returning it to risk, to gesture, to presence. Like in front of a Kiefer or a Kusama, where nothing can truly be pacified: everything remains in the balance, unresolved, crossed by conflict. But more than ever I live.
