‘Drumming is full of machismo, so vulgar, so dumb’: Valentina Magaletti, the musician giving the underground its rhythm | Experimental music
‘People tell me I’m a serial collaborator, but sometimes a dialogue is more interesting than a monologue,” says Italian drummer and musician Valentina Magaletti. “When you talk with yourself, you know where you’re going and what you want to say. When it’s with someone else, the narrative changes.”
Magaletti is one of the most prolific musicians currently working in experimental music. A voracious collaborator, she always has a clutch of releases just out or coming up. In September a meaty new collaboration with Afro-Portuguese artist Nídia was released; last month saw a new album from the un-pindownable Moin (a trio with production duo Raime, where she has been bumped from collaborator to band member). There’s also a 7in from her post-dub duo Holy Tongue coming up, an album from her duo V/Z (with Zongamin), and she will soon start recording her fourth solo album.
These releases fall among nonstop live dates – she thinks she has played about 100 shows this year, so today presents a rare chance to catch her at home in her London flat, with her cat Ashby (named after harpist Dorothy Ashby), in a space filled with art, objects, instruments and a very large record collection. Three walls of LPs cover one end of the room, watched over by cardboard cutouts of Maggie Simpson and David Bowie. There’s a baseball cap reading “MAKE NOISE MUSIC GAY AGAIN”, a small piano swamped by cassettes and zines, a guitar and a glass cabinet of curiosities.
What filing system does she use for the records, I ask as we sit down for a coffee. “It depends on the girl I’m dating,” she laughs. Her own archive is on overspill shelves in the spare room, with other bands she’s been in: psychedelic pop band Vanishing Twin; Tomaga (a duo with the late Tom Relleen), CZN with percussionist João Pais Filipe, and releases from label and micro-publisher Permanent Draft, co-run with her partner, French writer Fanny Chiarello.
As a drummer Magaletti is often called versatile, but it’s more accurate to say she is insatiably hungry to play, with the grounding to carve out a distinctive style wherever she places herself. Her sound is tight but textural: more like an etching than a painting, with precise lines building idiosyncrasies that come from process, context, and collaborators. She is interested in things feeling “slightly off, or impenetrable”, she says, although latterly she has been compared to Jaki Liebezeit – and has filled his shoes in the Can Project. She names American jazz drummer, percussionist and professor Milford Graves as a key influence, for “extending what drums meant, not just physically, but also poetically. A kind of Fluxus energy – that’s what I’m after. Everything is so often in a grid, but drums are physical: it’s just you and your environment; your body versus an object.”
Magaletti says she always wanted to be a drummer. She was thrown out of the classroom at school in Bari, Italy for drumming with pencils on the table, and says her mother jokes about how single-minded she is. “Playing music, going to gigs, listening to music, it’s all I want,” she says. She began learning young, playing rock by age 10, then studying at Bari’s Niccolò Piccinni conservatory, and then taking lessons with Goblin drummer Agostino Marangolo. She moved to London in 2000, enormously expanding her cast of collaborators: she once told an interviewer she left Bari because she’d jammed with everyone in town.
After the conservatory she started to pull apart her learnings. “This deconstruction happened because I saw that drumming had often been really conventional, even in the way the kit is presented – it’s always the bloody same,” she says. “It’s very machismo, showing off how fast [you can play]. This is so vulgar, so dumb. There’s so much more to this instrument – it’s so versatile! You can talk to drums – you can be orchestral, you can be groovy, or textural, or ritualistic. From day one I felt the instrument was very punished, but percussion is such a huge world. That’s why I keep exploring: I can’t help it, there’s so much to it, and each collaboration feeds me new ideas, a new way, new material.”
As well as her bands, she has also played with acts from across rock, experimental and synth pop scenes: Nicolas Jaar, Radiohead’s Philip Selway, Dali de Saint Paul’s EP/64, the London Improvisers Orchestra, and on artist Yves Chaudouët’s porcelain drumkit, among others. But she prefers to form new outfits than be or use “featured” artist credits. “I prefer collaborating because then we can share everything,” she says. “Otherwise it can be like a football team, when you pay loads of money for all those champion players, and then you don’t score.”
People often ask her how she manages to do so much: Magaletti says she is not stymied by self-critique and doesn’t care about what others think. (She’s an Aries, she says by way of explanation.) “I don’t really care about people judging whether I’m a good drummer or a bad drummer, because I’ve got an ability to judge when something is finished,” she says. “I’m happy about this power, because I’m trying to catch the urge, the moment, who I am now – and percussion helps with that. I do sometimes ask myself, why you do this? What are you trying to achieve? Moondog said: ‘I play three-four, four-four, five-four … but who for, and what for?’ And that, I really don’t know.”
