Friday 8 March 2024, 7.30pm
Very pleased to present a three-day residency with the great drummer-composer and multi-instrumentalist, Valentina Magaletti, drawing on the incredible depth and variety of her creative practice, and encompassing solo sets, new collaborations, films screenings and talks.
Magaletti's versatile technique, which can incorporate anything from vibes and marimba to contact microphones and found objects, results in a style that is forever evolving. Feeling just as comfortable performing behind a delicate ceramic kit as she does hammering out motorik rhythms, her creative take on percussion has resulted in a diverse discography and many interesting collaborations.
As a drummer, Magaletti moves effortlessly between the seemingly disparate worlds of alternative and mainstream music. She has played with artists such as Jandek, Pat Thomas, Deb Googe, Malcolm Mooney, Thurston Moore, Steve Beresford, Steve Shelley, Lafawndah, Mica Levi, Sampha, Kamasi Washington, and Nicolas Jaar to name a few. In addition to collaborating with the gamelan Ensemble Nist-Nah and drummers Malcom Catto, Julian Sartorius and Charles Hayward, she has played with stalwarts of the experimental underground scene like Gnod’s Marlene Ribeiro, Wire’s Graham Lewis, and Thighpaulsandra (Coil). In 2017, Valentina participated in The Can Project, standing in for the late Jaki Liebezeit, at London’s Barbican Centre.
Magaletti’s compositional credits are just as elaborate: with Tom Relleen, she was one half of Tomaga, the critically acclaimed electronic duo; with Al Wootton, she creates irresistible claustrophobic dub as Holy Tongue; with Pino Montecalvo, under the Avvitagalli alias, Valentina improvises intricate sonic collages; alongside percussionist João Pais Filipe, as CZN, she constructs hallucinatory rhythmic worlds, which are as fragile as they are eternal.
An experimental supergroup of epic proportions, Ondata Rossa is made up of renowned musicians Valentina Magaletti (Vanishing Twin, Moin, Holy Tongue), Agathe Max, Dali De Saint Paul (HARRGA) and Yoshino Shigihara (Yama Warashi).
Having recorded EP64-63 (EP being Ephemeral Project), their musical encounter at New River Studios (to be released on Valentina’s own label, Permanent Draft), these four widely experienced improvisers will join once more for a live performance at this year’s Supersonic. Through deft percussion, violin, electronics & vocals, each musician’s own world can at a time echo with melancholia and darkness, though the power generated by their crossroad appears to be, thanks to a strange alchemy, a vivid and luminous force. On stage, Laura Phillips brings visual forms and colours by blending live 16 mm film footage with her own creations, swaying between abstraction and figuration.
“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (The Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Recent projects include TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, and THE SITE OF AN INVESTIGATION, a 30-minute epic for Walshe’s voice and orchestra, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. THE SITE has been performed by Walshe and the NSO, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and also the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, was released on Tetbind in 2020. The album uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. A Late Anthology was chosen as an album of the year in The Irish Times, The Wire and The Quietus. Walshe is currently a professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Stuttgart. Her work was recently profiled by Alex Ross in The New Yorker.
Permanent Draft is a queer record label and micro-press founded by musician Valentina Magaletti and writer Fanny Chiarello that aims for giving an exposure to contemporary female/non-binary/transgender artists. Permanent Draft aims to highlight works showing a certain taste for fragmentary, irrepressible creative eruption and lo-fi experiments.
In 2023 Permanent Draft put out their first release EP64/63 by Ondata Rossa (Dali De Saint Paul, Valentina Magaletti, Yoshino Shigihara (Yama Warashi), Agathe Max and Laura Phillips). Basta Now: Women, Trans & Non-binary in Experimental Music by Fanny Chiarello is the first book publication on the label, and a further statement in support of the underrepresented female sonic artists.
The book is a non academic essay, unraveling in the end a list of more than 2250 names of female, trans and non-binary artists. The form is playful and is laid out in a careful design with illustrations, photographs and lists. Fanny Chiarello is a French award-winning writer of novels, poetry and children's literature, edited by numerous renowned publishers.
Alpha Maid (aka Leisha Thomas) is a guitarist, vocalist, and producer from South London. Alpha Maid's debut EP 'Spy' (2019) was released by the collective/label CURL, whose live shows she would also perform in. She continues to collaborate in various forms with fellow members such as Ben Vince, Coby Sey and Mica Levi. Alpha Maid's debut vinyl release 'CHUCKLE' EP (2021) was released on the C.A.N.V.A.S. collective/label, and garnered significant critical attention. In spring 2023 Alpha Maid teamed up with Mica Levi to self-release their joint EP ‘spresso’.
