Drummers and electronic devices make strange bedfellows. Drummers’ timekeeping is fluid; even at its most rocksteady, it’s enlivened by tiny, imperceptible pauses and hiccups. Zoom in far enough, and even the most motorik, iron-clad groove might reveal unexpectedly baggy pockets. Sequencers and drum machines, on the other hand, march in lockstep. You can program a certain degree of variability into their regimented churn, but any suggestion of flux is an illusion. Pairing the two is like trying to solder copper wires to fast-twitch muscle fibers. With control ceded to the computer clock, the drummer is left filling in the spaces like a kid with a coloring book, straining against the tyranny of the click track in their ears.
But when Valentina Magaletti and upsammy play together, none of the usual limitations seem to apply. It helps that the Italian-born, London-based drummer is an extraordinarily nuanced percussionist, a rhythmic force of nature with the precision of a 3D printer. It helps, too, that the Dutch electronic musician’s work has an unusually organic underpinning; influenced by biological processes, her music tends to move like cells squirming beneath the microscope. But what really makes their collaboration sing is the way they seem to explode rhythm from the inside, blasting it into tiny fragments and then cobbling those back together, bit by bit, into micromosaics of metal, rubber, and glass.
Seismo’s origins lie in a commission to soundtrack an exhibition at Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. The pair recorded sounds and patterns on drums and mallet instruments in the museum’s galleries, taking advantage of the halls’ distinctive room tone; upsammy (aka Thessa Torsing) then worked those materials alongside her own arsenal of synths and field recordings into an hour-long expanse of luminous tones and rustling crackles that resembled brightly colored fish darting across the pebbled seafloor. From there, they further developed their collaboration on stage and in the studio, leading to this, their debut album as a duo.
Their Bojimans piece largely emphasized freeform drift over quantized rhythms, offering ample leeway to Magaletti’s unpredictable percussive filigree. Here, electronic and muscle-driven pulses are more tightly fused. The same goes for the musicians’ overlapping palettes, which are often difficult to tease apart. Is that a snare flam or a voltage-controlled burst of white noise? A struck plastic object or an ingenious demonstration of physical modeling synthesis? Bar after bar presents fresh vistas on the duo’s sumptuously textured uncanny valley.
The album begins in relatively understated fashion with “It Comes to an End.” Magaletti ventures a tentative introduction of brushes on snares; following the muted peal of distant thunder, upsammy chimes in with a plangent synthesizer sequence reminiscent of Arovane and other IDM producers from around the turn of the millennium. Then, a minute further, the first indicator that all is not what it seems: An insistent digital vibraphone riff cuts crosswise against the song’s pulse, leading briefly to the sensation of two different time signatures at once. They don’t lean too hard on the polyrhythmic lever, though; where some artists might opt for number-crunching displays of rocket science, they’re content to tug at the rug beneath your feet, tweaking your sense of balance just enough to leave you momentarily woozy.
The mood can be graceful; like the opener, “Thickness of Signs” is led by a streamlined, brightly chiming synthesizer melody that leaves Magaletti’s choppy rhythms trailing in its wake. More often, a spirit of jittery determination takes hold. “Superimposed” rides atop a series of drum’n’bass-like syncopations, propelled by a riff like fingers scrabbling at electric bass strings; “Hyperlocalize” speeds past footwork tempo, juggling skittering percussion and silvery shards of piano. The programmed bassline suggests a lab-grown clone of Jaco Pastorius; the antic rhythms might be the spawn of Raymond Scott. “Collide” also evokes the headlong charge of drum’n’bass, though I’d be hard pressed to decide whether Magaletti’s limbs or upsammy’s MIDI clock are in charge of the downbeat. “Every Cell Thought Every Thinkable Thing” is the opposite: There’s no obvious pulse at all, just pinprick hits rolling like ball bearings on the prow of a storm-tossed boat.
But no matter how hectic Seismo ever gets, a more measured sense of flow carries the day. Across the jagged volcanic landscape of spontaneous eruptions and tumbling detritus, a space of relative calm will invariably open up. The closing track, “Some Unimaginable World,” works like that: After the atom-smashing attack that has preceded it, the song eases into a succession of airy synthesizer pads and drums that swirl like autumn leaves. It feels like a well-earned breather, and perhaps a vantage point—an opportunity to survey the dazzling scope of the pair’s joint creation and realize how skillfully they’ve blurred the line between the natural and the superhuman.
