Make your first listen to Seismo a naive one. Don’t think about its makers, and the many excellent projects they have worked on. Don’t think about how exciting it is to hear a bold percussionist like Valentina Magaletti collaborate with a producer who can match her inventiveness and unrestricted approach to form and genre. Try not to think about PAN, the storied label backing it. If you can, forget Moin, Midori Takada, Steve Reich, Nicolas Jaar, Miles Davis, Shackleton, or any other past collaborator or influence you might hear flashes of within its eight songs. Don’t think of its backstory: how it formed out of a commission by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, and what that setting might say about the music.
Just listen. It’s a record full of life, texture and newness, where the thing itself offers just as much as an entity separated from the people and contexts that produced it.
To have that background knowledge is thrilling in its own way, of course. Knowing its creators, it is joyous and surprising to hear how seamlessly upsammy and Magaletti sound together. There’s awe in noticing how skilfully they blend live drum parts with synthesised percussion and samples. The two artists focused largely on mallet instruments for both digital and analogue parts as a way to find fluidity and common ground. They built something new in the squishy middle of their experiences. Imagining that making process is inspiring, and there’s a giddiness to working out whose fingerprints are on what. The answer is likely both, everywhere.
But to cast all that aside also frees the record of expectation. “What’s important is that it sounds good, whatever happens,” said Magaletti in a Quietus interview when discussing the Rijksmuseum collaboration. “Some people are more alpha or insecure, but what we’re doing is just an exchange of something fluid, it’s energy isn’t it? It’s not just about you or the other person. It’s about what’s coming out.”
What comes out is vivid and timeless electronic music which lives somewhere between the club, an open landscape and the void of space. The first track ‘It Comes To An End’ contains the head-spinning depth and vibrancy which colours the rest of the album. Nimble sub-bass and queasy synth lines coil around a marimba, which becomes a hypnotic focal point before skittering off in the distance, new sounds filling the negative space. The record constantly moves, reorients and creates from scratch. What is loose and ambient becomes tight and lively, before melting into a fresh idea.
‘Superimposed’ is the most drum-forward track, where a full kit trades breaks with programmed beats. Tension and texture lie in the separation between the two. ‘Hyperlocalize’ opts to play with clashing energies – a bare, slow-moving piano phrase hovering above frenetic percussion. Each part shines light on the other, the openness of one and constriction of the other emphasised by what it’s placed next to.
While ‘Hyperlocalize’ buzzes with doubt and anxiety, ‘Thickness of Signs’ is straightforwardly hopeful. Its gentle two-bar melody is more comforting for the dissonance placed around it on the tracklist. There’s a boundlessness to the way the music moves. Shifts in rhythm and micro-details lead to a feeling of infinite potential, and so much to discover in these densely-packed soundscapes.
‘Collide’ shifts and reforms like an alien organism. With its cyclical kick drum, it’s the closest to a club track here, albeit still with an off-kilter, off-world feel. Built from scattered snares and rimshots, it becomes impossible to trace what is live, what is spliced and digitised, rehearsed or improvised. The record again evokes wonder with the sounds it presents.
To put the context back in, the duo were suitably unorthodox when deciding on how their collaboration would take shape. Their prompt was to create new audio work to accompany an exhibition featuring major pieces from the collection of the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, including paintings by Monet, Yayoi Kusama, Dalí, Picasso, Mondrian, Rubens and Kiefer. Rather than responding to the work directly, they decided to do their own naive reading of sorts, and took influence from the museum space around them in its totality. They recorded snippets of material throughout the museum’s maze of open spaces, and manipulated Magaletti’s drumming to incorporate and augment the reverb within each room. When completed, their contribution became an immersive walkthrough exhibition, where the mix of acoustic and synthesised sounds react to the architecture, the plants and the water features as much as the paintings. It encourages curiosity and presence no matter what is hanging on the walls.
Listening to the record which emerged from this collaborative project, now detached from the space that inspired it, becomes an opportunity to attach new meanings and new places. The listener is as much a participant as visitors were when walking through the gallery. Like all lasting records, the mood you’re in, the details you focus on, and where you listen to it affect the meaning. There’s infinite potential here, and the skill of its artists is encouraging the listener to be inspired by what’s presented.
Experimental electronic music, like potentially imposing museum spaces, comes with expectations of difficulty or prior reading which needs to be done. Artists like upsammy and Magaletti emphasise the potential playfulness and accessibility of art which doesn’t conform to expectation. As skilled and studied as it clearly is, Seismo’s appeal is right there on the surface, waiting to be discovered. ‘Some Unimaginable World’ closes the album with a gentle meditation, as breezy and welcoming as an open door. Spin the record again. Forget the rest. Hear for yourself what can be found in its bright world of sound.
