It’s not simple to inform who’s doing what on “Mata,” one of many highlights of Nídia and Valentina Magaletti’s debut album collectively. Neither artist has tried a collaboration fairly like this earlier than, and maybe that’s why it’s so propulsive. Beatmaker Nídia has by no means labored with a distinguished multi-instrumentalist offering uncooked materials on the fly; drummer Magaletti doesn’t usually work inside a dance music context, particularly not one like Nídia’s. In “Mata,” their scuffed congas, bongos, and synths go scrambling across the beat, alive with the anticipation of how they may interlock subsequent. You may hear the 2 artists pushing one another as they meet within the center.
Raised between Bordeaux and her birthplace of Vale da Amoreira, within the higher Lisbon area, Nídia has moved outward from her roots within the Lisbon scene’s continuum of diasporic sounds, like kuduro and tarraxinha, from Lusophone Africa. Since rising on SoundCloud as a teen and becoming a member of the label Príncipe Discos, she’s put her spin on tracks from Fever Ray, Yaeji, and Kelela and mingled with a extensive sweep of world social gathering sounds to display simply how far she will be able to take her beats with out dropping her signature aptitude. The Italy-born, London-based Magaletti is equally prolific on a distinct circuit: Whether or not she’s making post-hardcore with Moin, tight psychedelic jams with Tomaga, or her anthological solo tasks, her unassuming however versatile method treats percussion as a “narrative” wherein every new breakbeat or clattering discovered object is a pure—and useful—rhythmic selection. Nídia and Valentina have been leaning in parallel instructions currently. Nídia’s 2023 album 95 MINDJERES introduced her pressure of batida right into a looser, extra open-ended mode, uncannily approximating the improvisational really feel of a stay band together with her laptop-producer chops. In the meantime, a latest venture by Magaletti’s dub band Holy Tongue with Shackleton spotlights the way in which dance music’s constraints can provide a performer’s off-kilter textural concept the liberty to take root and evolve throughout an prolonged beat.
Nídia and Magaletti’s collaborative debut, Estradas, will get so much out of its setup. Every observe is constructed out of shifting polyrhythms that they compose collectively: Magaletti performs numerous instrumental strains to make up the beats, whereas Nídia contributes her personal programmed loops. The frothy MIDI snap of Nídia’s earlier tasks provides approach to a rigorous studio combine courtesy of Magaletti’s Moin bandmate Tom Halstead, with every instrument dutifully mic’d up and given area. When it’s performed straight, adapting Nídia-style dance beats to an aesthetic nearer to Raime can really feel gratuitous, like these blown-out remixes of in style songs you hear in film trailers. However the ensemble-oriented presentation helps the duo pull off some new methods.
