Valentina Magaletti

Paradigm-shifting percussionist Valentina Magaletti stops time on ‘La Tempesta Colorata’, a long-form set that rolls thru tempos and time signatures with gymnastic flexibility, offering another spectacular entry to A Colourful Storm’s gravity-defying recent run of releases.

Magaletti is a regular and constant presence on these pages as a member of Moin, Vanishing Twin, Tomaga and CZN, as well as thru endless collabs with everyone from Floating Points to Nicolas Jaar, Jandek to Helm. For our money, though, she’s at her most arresting when operating in solo mode. “La Tempesta Colorata” was recorded at Cafe Oto in October 2021and follows her astonishing 2020 solo set “A Queer Anthology of Drums” with a virtuoso performance that never drags for a moment, fluctuating from ASMR scraping to angular post-punk rhythmic pulsewerk.

With a full drum set, a handful of additional small instruments and a delay pedal, Magaletti somehow captures a full spectrum of sound, employing only minor additional elements to flesh out her sound. From the dewdrop swagger of the opening minutes, thru rolling tom-led seismic activity – complete with customary screams – and into echoing industrial dub-improv experimentation, she’s able to assemble her rhythms with metronomic accuracy, but with enough space in the gaps to enhance inherent human qualities – a far cry from fully electronic studio productions.

It’s a spellbinding display of polymetric complexities where no two seconds repeat themselves, persistently pulling patterns apart and restitching them in diffractive slow-fast-slow temporalities that arc from showers of cascading hi-hats, to pugilistic breaks, to an unexpected trough of Twin Peaks-y drones around the mid-section, only to climb out of it via icicles of melodic chimes and into more humid areas of her imagination, ultimately shoring up in pitch black Amazonian zones.

If you’re into anyone from Autechre to Eli Keszler, Milton Graves to Han Bennink, this one’s a mindmelt.