Next level, ritualistic percussion jams from blessed percussionists João Pais Filipe and Valentina Magaletti, alongside producer Leon Marks. Two trance-invoking, long-form time melters that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Offen Music boss Vladimir Ivkovic’s notoriously heady mid-morning DJ sets. Fans of Nihiloxica, This Heat, Donato Dozzy, Beatrice Dillon or Muslimgauze don’t wanna miss this one.
Swiftly following the “Luxury Variations” EP on Trilogy Tapes comes “Communicator”, a weighty celebration of the kick drum’s energetic, repetitive motion. The album expands the dubwise short-form sonics of its predecessor, allowing its two tracks to build slowly, zeroing in on almost imperceptible rhythmic shifts. Both tracks hover around a danceable central rhythm, with each percussionist skillfully tripping and stepping around each beat with the grace of ballet dancers performing a lavish, complicated routine.
Aside from drums, there’s only gaseous traces of any other instrumentation; occasionally a synthesizer burbles from an adjacent floatation tank before swirling into the next dimension. It’s like This Heat’s paradigm-shifting avant post-punk, Miles Davis’s “On The Corner”-era repetitive funk hypnosis or Donato Dozzy’s sparse, groove-heavy progressive techno world-building, but stripped to its bare essentials. There’s nothing out of place here, no needless frills and no pointless posturing: “Communicator” is drum music for heads.
