Friday 7 March 2025, 7.30pm
Excited to welcome back the great drummer-composer and multi-instrumentalist, Valentina Magaletti, for a three-day residency 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.
Alessandra Novaga is a Milan based guitarist and composer. For years she has been exploring the possible territories in which her instrument can lead her. She has crossed the classical territories, in which she trained, graduating from the Musik Akademie in Basel, until reaching impalpable abstractions without placing limits on one or the other.
The sound, the meanings, the encounters and the narratives are the elements that guide her.
In addition to her solo projects, her collaborations currently see her often playing with Stefano Pilia, and with the trio of which she is co-founder, What We do When in Silence, together with Nicola Ratti and Enrico Malatesta. In recent years she has collaborated with Loren Connors, Elliot Sharp, Adrian Utley, Sandro Mussida, Kid Millions, Object Collection, Patrizia Oliva, Elena Kakaliagou.
Las Tres Gracias is a site-specific, operatic installation that reexamines western civilization’s myth of democracy and the architecture and role of the theater as both a political and pedagogical experiment. Drawing inspiration from ancient cosmologies and Third World vision, the work explores the cyclical nature of destruction and renewal within the context of ongoing imperialism and the normalization of contemporary forms of fascism.
The project takes its name from a missing neoclassical sculpture, Las Tres Gracias—which once stood in the botanical gardens of Buenos Aires—and the subsequent search for it. This sculpture depicts the three daughters of the Greek god Zeus, believed to bestow beauty, mirth and grace upon humanity. Utilizing the structure of Greek tragedy as a point of departure, Las Tres Gracias incorporates sound, video, sculpture, light, and text, to create a sensory landscape that reflects on the absurdity, beauty, and brutality of existence.
On Gym Douce EP, Permanent Draft label founders Valentina Magaletti and Fanny Chiarello (author of Basta Now, Women, Trans & Non-Binary in Experimental Music) illustrate their aesthetic line by offering sound collages, bitter laughs, and deranged miniatures based on poetry and percussion recorded in a punk burst, along with field recordings and other oddities.
