Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 377 Items

London based Valentina Magaletti, is a composer, producer and percussionist experimenting with new materials and sounds. She is one of the most prominent musicians of the wide experimental world. The prolific drummer collaborates with many musicians and releases albums in all musical directions (from noise to jazz by way of dub...). She was part of the acclaimed duo Tomaga until the tragic passing of Tom Relleen in 2020. Lately Valentina Magaletti collaborates with Joao Pais Filipe, Lafawndah, Marlene Ribeiro, Julian Sartorius among many others and she is part of bands like Vanishing Twin, Better Corners, Holy Tongue, Uuuu, Avvitagalli, Moin... She released 3 solo albums, La Tempesta Colorata (A Colourful Storm, 2022), A Queer Anthology Of Drums (Takuroku/Cafe Oto, 2020) and Valentina Plays The Batterie Fragile (Un je-ne-sais-quoi, 2017).

The Batterie fragile is a sculpture conceived by artist Yves Chaudouët. A drum-kit made out of porcelain.

Yves Chaudouët is a French visual artist. His first interest was painting. From the 1990s, he began to experiment with other art forms such as filmmaking, installation, theater and novels.

This is the second installment of recording on that amazing drum kit. The first recording (2017) was a testimony of the 1st meeting between Valentina and the drumkit during a live experience in Tours (Fr) at le Musée des Beaux-Arts during the Super Flux Festival. It was a raw recording (fragile itself) picking up a very quick meeting and two magical improvisations. It naturally led Yves Chaudouët to build another Batterie fragile with few improvements (as if the 1st one were a prototype) and quickly to plan to record another album.

Recorded in 2021 at Impersonal studio in Rennes (fr) with Thomas Poli on a magnificent analog console Studer 928, edited and mixed in 2022 at Abbey Road studio (uk) by Valentina Magaletti and Leon Marks, this outstanding recording, composed and performed by Valentina Magaletti on an unlikely sounding instrument is a poetic and unique experience. Valentina took time to explore all the sounding possibilities of the drums, using different kinds of sticks, wire brushes and rubber beaters. The recordings have been assembled in a collage-style approach dear to her and result in two otherworldly tracks that reveal a few secrets of the mysterious drum kit through Valentina Magaletti’s fantastic play and delicate versatility.

To create this new album, Magaletti says, “I applied wood and metal and rubber to the porcelain. My starting point is always textural, and I’m very interested and enchanted by friction.”

An important work in the career of one of the best drummers and composers of her time, which Un je-ne-sais-quoi is proud to share with you.

Dense and beautiful electronic music that falls somewhere between T++ / Various Artists, early Boards of Canada, Basic Channel and Carl Craigs most epic works. This record contains rare & long out of print classic tracks from the three Pub EP's that were released on Ampoule in 1999, 2001and 2003 respectively. There are also two 2 exclusive cuts which have been never released on vinyl before. Remastered by Dubplates & Mastering and new artwork by Pub.

Director David Lynch once said "I long for a kind of quiet where I can just drift and dream. I always say getting inspiration is like fishing. If you're quiet and sitting there and you have the right bait, you're going to catch a fish eventually. Ideas are sort of like that. You never know when they're going to hit you." Inspired by this quote in both name and spirit, Hollie Kenniff's The Quiet Drift is an ambient gallery of cloudlike synths, seraphic strings, echoing guitars, and other celestial textures guided to cohesion by Hollie's own wordless singing. Though the album certainly creates (and originates from) the kind of space where Lynch's proverbial "fish" can be caught, The Quiet Drift is a fitting title for Hollie's own history, both recent and distant. During the course of the album's creation, Hollie and her family moved cross-country from an island in Washington state, to an island in Maine before ultimately relocating to Canada. "As a child I visited Ontario year-round," she explains in her own words. She continues "More than any other landscape, I think the lake, rivers, and woods there left the most enduring impression on me. The landscape and pace of life of these places will always stay with me." But the reverberant spaces Hollie crafts need no physical headquarters. Instead of conjuring views of nature at the ground level, her sound more readily evokes a top-down perspective, with the distinct features of the land shrinking underfoot as the listener becomes untethered from geography altogether. The Quiet Drift belongs more to the liminal spaces between life and afterlife, memory and fantasy, landscape and dreamscape, than any mappable locale. Describing her formative years, Hollie says "As a dual US/Canadian citizen who spent my childhood in a rural town-- one that I haven't returned to in many years - I have a sense of not entirely belonging anywhere. When I was a teenager my close friends were male musicians, so I was also an outsider to the degree that they were wild and anarchic in a way that I wasn't. I was a quiet book reader and avid music listener who enjoyed being around a creative group. I was also a radio DJ for alternative and punk music throughout high school." In this light, The Quiet Drift attests that creativity is placeless, and calls into question the stereotype of artists as scene-centric city dwellers. Having come of age in the absence of metropolitan sensory overload, Hollie learned to spot the muse in nature, and within herself, instead of the echo chamber of a frenzied peer group. On The Quiet Drift Hollie Kenniff wholly escapes from such pop-culture feedback loops into transcendent, shimmering realms, and she brings the listener along with her. In this age in which we have all been called to reevaluate our relationship to indoor spaces, and seek refuge in the great outdoors, The Quiet Drift provides an apt soundtrack for such rebalancing.

Recorded on the heels of their debut album If Two World Kiss (Also reissued by Dais on August 9th) and informed by the band's oscillating live synergy and bolstered by a boon of new equipment and texture, Pink Turns Blue's sophomore album Meta (1988) was a conceptual leap predicated by the study of sound and exploration of its edges. With the same fervor that Joy Division mined deeper, darker, and less linear on Closer, Meta is a cohesive meditation on atmosphere and how every note and passage can traverse space individually and as part of a larger narrative. Singles "Touch the Skies" and "Your Master Is Calling" are the albums cornerstones; airy, steady, and driving tracks with a depth of melody and orchestration that sparked a shimmering new example of dark pop. The instrumental balance throughout the album creates a strobe light journey later echoed throughout gothic compatriots exploring minor keys and nocturnal themes.

Back in print after 10 years! Repressed on 180 gram vinyl incl. Download code!