Seismo by Upsammy and Valentina Magaletti is the kind of record that is constantly in motion. Everything tilts, shifts, dissolves again. At times, the tracks get caught in ambient, floating planes, only to plunge moments later into rhythmic density. This constant reshaping runs through the entire album.
One quickly notices how many small details are embedded in it. So many that, with each repeated listen, different elements come into focus: a quiet click here, a displaced beat there, suddenly a sound that had not seemed present before. »Mementoes« is a good example, with its strange-sounding vocal snippets and metallic clatter. Or »Collide«, with its break-driven beat, which almost edges towards the dancefloor but is ultimately far too skewed for that. Everything feels somehow improvised and extremely controlled at the same time. And it is precisely in this balance between the two artists’ very different approaches that the album’s core lies: a continual sounding-out of boundaries without ever fixing them in place.
Perhaps this also has to do with the project’s origins, since Seismo was created as a commission for an exhibition. Rather than referring directly to the artworks, the two artists examined the museum spaces themselves, incorporating field recordings and the acoustics of the architecture into the music. And that is exactly what one hears. These slightly displaced, weird moments feel almost as though one were walking through a museum in which perception is constantly refracted anew. Here a Dalí undoing logic, there the echo of one’s own steps in the expanse of the room.
