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Valentina Magaletti

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Holy Tongue Meets Shackleton, “The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now” (AD93, 2024)

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Unsurprisingly, I have been following Holy Tongue since the project first surfaced with their killer self-titled EP back in 2020, as few things could more obviously be more right up my alley than a dub project from one of the most reliably fascinating drummers on the planet right now (Valentina Magaletti).  While I have certainly enjoyed the project’s entire discography thus far, my experience has been that there are plenty of times when Holy Tongue has sounded exactly like what I would expect from a Magaletti-centric dub project (a stripped-down, post-punk-influenced On-U Sound homage), but those pieces are sometimes interspersed with transcendent flashes of inspiration that feel like something considerably more adventurous and unique.  Notably, those left-field moments of brilliance started to appear a bit more frequently once the other half of Vanishing Twin’s rhythm section (bassist Susumu Mukai) joined the fold.  In keeping with that theme, the addition of yet another talented collaborator (Sam Shackleton) has triggered yet another sizable creative leap forward, as The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now is legitimately impressive enough to back up the wildly bold promise of its title (an Ornette Coleman-level feat if I ever saw one).

This particular dream collaboration began exactly the same way as many other dream collaborations before it: Holy Tongue and Shackleton shared a bill at a festival and their mutual admiration led to plans to work together.  In this case, the original idea was for Shackleton to remix an existing Holy Tongue song, but the scope happily blossomed into something much more interesting: Magaletti, Mukai, and Al Wootton recorded a bunch of raw new Holy Tongue material, handed it off to Shackleton, and gave him free rein to go hog wild with it.  Speaking as someone who was absolutely mesmerized by Shackleton’s recent collaboration with Six Organs of Admittance, I can confidently say that “let Shackleton go absolutely bananas” tends to be a winning strategy and Tumbling Psychic Joy adds another instant classic to the pre-existing pile of supporting evidence.  

That said, it did take me a handful of listens to fully grasp the visionary depth of this album, as I was initially frustrated by the shapeshifting nature of the beats and grooves.  My early instinct was “these are just improvisations and jams that have been skillfully woven together,” as Tumbling Psychic Joy is bursting with great grooves and motifs that are never allowed to expand into a full song.  Literally every song has at least a few passages that absolutely rule, but they are all ephemeral and invariably morph into something different rather than lingering and expanding.

The most prominent example of that phenomenon is “Blessed and Bewildered,” as it deceptively opens with a swinging disco thump before Magaletti’s erratic and shapeshifting high-hat patterns quickly steer the groove into far wonkier and more serpentine terrain.  Along the way, the piece steadily accumulates subdued vibraphone melodies, smeared organ chords, warped trumpet skwonks, eerie flutes, wandering xylophone melodies, and burbling psychotropic weirdness en route to something that sounds like an improbably killer mash-up of Eva Luna-era Moonshake, Bitches Brew, and like four difference Stereolab songs filtered through Nurse With Wound-style surrealism.  Put more concisely, it is one hell of a chameleonic mindfuck and the only real constant holding it all together is Mukai’s deep, dubwise bass.  Notably, that piece is also something of a microcosm for the album as a whole, as Tumbling Psychic Joy feels like being led down a bottomless and deeply hallucinatory rabbit hole while guided only by a propulsive groove that itself is constantly transforming in character.  

Once I realized that, the ingenious construction of the album finally clicked for me and I stopped lamenting that my favorite moments did not stick around and started loving how beautifully and organically the endlessly morphing groove burrowed into fresh realms of psychotropic bliss without ever lingering in familiar or predictable terrain.  I was also struck by the sheer breadth of the various stylistic threads incorporated into Holy Tongue’s vision.  Naturally, a heavy influence from Jamaican dub runs through everything, but that bedrock is continually mutated by shades of everything from Can to space age bachelor pad music to noirish Lydia Lunch-style jazz.  For example, “The Merciful Lake” variously sounds like a field recording from a remote Tibetan temple, a sinuous contemporary espionage film soundtrack, and a very weird and proggy giallo soundtrack and it still finds room for a very cool and dubwise “spring reverb” interlude along the way.  Elsewhere, the closing “Gravity Will Fail Us” incorporates a welcome Les Baxter-style exotica influence and evokes something that alternately lands between “Vicki Bennett teams up with a reggaeton/dembow producer” and “Sam Shackleton gets a DJ gig at a tiki bar.”  

I could go into raptures about some of the wonderful individual sounds as well (trippy autoharp strums, loops that unpredictably slow, speed up, and pitch shift), but it makes more sense to just say that this whole fucking album is wonderfully immersive, deeply psychedelic, and vividly and vibrantly produced from start to finish.  Given how much I dig the previous work of everyone involved, it was virtually inevitable that The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now would delight me, but I was still taken aback by much this album shot past my highest expectations.  This is an absolutely stellar headphone album and easily one of the strongest releases in the discography of absolutely everyone involved.  

Listen here.

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Vanishing Twin, “Ookii Gekkou” (Fire, 2021)

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I was inexplicably late to the party on this wonderful London quartet, as the presence of drummer Valentina Magaletti is almost always a reliable indicator that something compelling is happening and that is especially true of this project. Fortunately, I realized my mistake when I chanced upon their 2019 single “Magician’s Success” and its delightfully surreal video, which scratched exactly the same itch as all my favorite Broadcast and Stereolab songs (two acts that Vanishing Twin is probably damned to be compared to forever). While I would admittedly be thrilled if Vanishing Twin simply picked up where those two other brilliant bands left off, their actual influences are considerably more wide-ranging and endlessly mutating (Morricone, Sun Ra, Martin Denny, and Alice Coltrane are just a few of the band’s explicit inspirations this time around). 

That said, the album does kick off with yet another excellent and welcome single in the vein of prime Stereolab (the title piece), yet the foursome also achieve a similar degree of success elsewhere with more disco- and swinging ’60s film soundtrack-inspired fare. For the most part, I look to Vanishing Twin primarily for great singles at this point and Ookii Gekkou includes at least three of those, so I consider it a success. The rest of the album occasionally verges on being too smoothly poppy for my taste, but the omnipresent virtuosic rhythm section of Magaletti and bassist Susumu Mukai goes a long way towards keeping the album groovy and fun enough to keep me interested regardless.

The lead-off “Big Moonlight (Ookii Gekkou)” certainly kicks the album off on an extremely strong note, as it feels like an arty and pleasantly lilting throwback to classic French pop. That is admittedly quite close to Stereolab territory, but Vanishing Twin put their own distinctive twist on that stylistic terrain, as their grooves are much more muscular and pared down than typical ‚ÄòLab fare. There are also some nice surreal touches like a twangy surf/spy movie guitar motif, a twinkling xylophone theme, and a great flute hook to further flesh out Cathy Lucas’s sensuously sing-song vocal melody. The overall feel is akin to a haunted and seductive trip down an Alice in Wonderland-style rabbit hole of breezy psychedelia. 

Similarly excellent is the simmering and funky disco vamp of “Phase One Million,” which is essentially just a killer groove with a neat cowbell stutter (and that is absolutely all it needs). Later on, the album’s third and arguably final great single materializes in the form of “In Cucina,” which boasts a great rolling groove with plenty of percussion flourishes. It feels like a kindred spirit to “The Snake” from Tomaga’s Intimate Immensity, approximating an aesthetic best described as “climactic scene from a ’60s spy movie that features a wild dance party at a Moroccan brothel.” 

The remaining pieces are a mixed bag of sorts, but not from lack of inspiration: Vanishing Twin’s muse just tends to lead them into some very bizarre and highly specific stylistic niches that are sometimes not my thing. For example, “Zuum” sounds like Silver Apples teamed up with The Fifth Dimension for a spacey rock opera, while “The Organism” feels like a darkly lysergic horror film in which the protagonist is stalked by an infernally possessed marimba or xylophone. 

Some of those divergent paths do hold some allure for me (the post-punk/motorik groove-fest “Tub Erupt”), while some others simply do not (“The Lift” feels like a Swing Out Sister song interrupted by a jabbering robot). Obviously, I wish I loved every single song on Ookii Gekkou, but I do genuinely love Vanishing Twin, as they are consistently ingenious in both assimilating new influences and crafting killer uncluttered arrangements. When this band hits the mark, they can seem downright untouchable, so I do not mind sifting through a handful of misfires to find a couple of gems that will no doubt remain in my heavy rotation for years.

Samples can be found here.

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Tomaga, “Intimate Immensity” (Hands In The Dark, 2021)

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It is unfortunate that this final album from Tomaga is being released in the shadow of Tom Relleen’s untimely passing, as Intimate Immensity probably could have been the London duo’s breakthrough release otherwise. I first became aware of the project through a combination of drummer Valentina Magaletti’s many other appearances (Vanishing Twin, Raime, Helm, etc.) and stumbling upon Memory in Vivo Exposure while briefly obsessed with exotica-inspired ambiance. While I would not describe this latest album as particularly exotica-inspired for a Tomaga release, Relleen and Magaletti have always had a unique, eclectic, and constantly evolving off-beat vision, so there is no dearth of unusual juxtapositions and unexpected divergences among these ten songs. I suppose Vanishing Twin’s Stereolab-esque aesthetic is as good a reference point as any, as the best songs here feel like the soundtrack of an arty European cult film from the ’60s or ’70s improved with subtle hallucinatory flourishes, exotic atmospheric touches, and muscular dub-wise grooves.

I would not describe myself as particularly drum-obsessed, but there are definitely a handful of drummers and percussionists who are reliably compelling when freed from the constraints of conventional songs and Valentina Magaletti is one of them. She is a bit of an aberration in that regard though, as she tends to churn out killer beats rather than wild, free-form solos. Tomaga has long been the home for those killer beats and Relleen is the perfect foil on Intimate Immensity, enhancing Magaletti’s grooves with deep, dubby bass motifs, evocative splashes of color, and eclectic melodic themes. In some ways, Muslimgauze is another one of Tomaga’s closest kindred spirits, but if Bryn Jones had not been monomaniacally obsessed with the Middle East and had instead spent his time in tiki bars watching Serge Gainsbourg and Guy Maddin films and obsessively absorbing every weird soundtrack that Finders Keepers reissues.

In that light, the album’s best song is a bit of an anomaly, as “Intimate Immensity” has the feel of a bizarrely sensual, tripped-out elegy, as an achingly lovely descending string motif floats above a slowed-down “Funky Drummer”-style beat and rubbery, ping-ponging electronics. The industrial-tinged “British Wildlife” is a delight as well, resembling a Carter Tutti remix of a Martin Denny album, yet the album’s most sustained run of greatness occurs mid-album, as “The Snake,” “Very Never,” and “More Flowers” are all cool as hell. All sound very cinematic and would be perfect for a late ’60s spy movie set in Marrakech or my next escape from a haunted tropical island, but the alternately rolling and lurching grooves ensure that they feel like something for more visceral and vivid than a mere pastiche of cool influences. While I have not quite made it through Tomaga’s entire discography yet, I would be extremely surprised if any of the duo’s previous albums surpass this one, as the highlights here feel impressively revelatory.

Samples can be found here.