13.09.24

Blending Afro-Portuguese kuduro with syncopated drums and electronics, Nídia and Valentina Magaletti’s collaborative album harnesses the sticky energy of Lisbon dancefloors to power an explorative, percussive trip

Nídia and Valentina Magaletti are masters of their respective rhythmic crafts, and waste little time in demonstrating so on their new collaborative album, Estradas. We hear a smattering of musique concrète – what sounds like the quiet rumble of a washing machine and the possible hum of cicadas – before the opening track clatters into life: a half-step groove of abounding percussion and blaring, siren-like synth stabs, all questing forward with breakneck momentum. Andiamo, the name of the song, translates to “let’s go” in English. Yes, let’s.

If you know the work of either Afro-Portuguese club artist Nídia (a long-term affiliate of the Lisbon electronic label, Príncipe) or the Italian-British, avant-garde drummer Valentina Magaletti (of Holy Tongue, Tomaga, Raime, Vanishing Twin), you’ll be able to make out the fault lines of their individual contributions. Nídia brings shuffling, often delightfully loose batida to the project, the warmth of her beats undercut by icy, eski-esque synths; Magaletti melds intricate, virtuoso drumming with found sounds. 

Crucially, each approaches their respective discipline from a sideways angle. The spacious arrangements and chest-rattling 808 bass of Nídia’s music often owes more to rap and grime than frenzied club music – and even when she steps into the latter mode, she has little regard for endorphin-releasing drops. One of Magaletti’s most warmly received records, 2020’s A Queer Anthology of Drums, was an attempt, she told Tone Glow, “to conceive of drums in a kind of inclusive and weird way”.

But it’s more than a shared disregard for the musical conventions of their chosen fields that gives Estradas (which translates to “roads”) its sense of cohesion. The pair have an innate understanding of the different ways music can move the body. 

After the skipping opener, they up the ante with Rapido, a blistering percussive workout which more than lives up its name. Imagine bruising kuduro of the kind Príncipe is famed for, except skittering hi-hats, snares and pounding toms have been laid over the electronic beat, each drum fill occupying what would typically be left as negative space. This kuduro sound is squirmier and twitchier than Nídia’s typical solo productions – a touch more restless than sensual, but no less danceable. On Rapido, Nídia and Magaletti are in total rhythmic lockstep.

The pace lets up a little with Sicilia. As if sweltering in the mid-afternoon heat, Magaletti’s drumming is languid and loose, chiming alongside Nídia’s cool electronics, which sound like beads of water trickling down a cold glass. On the title track, marimba, martial snares and bright streaks of colourful synth roll along at a nonchalant 90 bpm: music for dancing in the sun. 

These tracks have a club pulse, but they’re also perfectly suited to the home stereo. Listen closely to Magaletti’s spidery, splintering percussion, flittering and fluttering across the odd, sometimes brutalist electronic foundations laid by Nídia. The intricacy of these tracks recalls dubstep pioneer Shackleton’s roiling polyrhythmic experiments; elsewhere, their propulsiveness brings to mind Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force.

You may feel similarly engulfed by drums, but this album is fleeter of foot, and more lighthearted, than either of those projects. Take No Promises, the biggest surprise here, in which skittish, syncopated percussion is paired with a needling Afrobeat guitar riff, each element building tension without ever resolving it – that is, until a final moment of abrupt silence. 

Magaletti has described her drumming as a “narrative”. Rather than being a foregrounding technique or something dry and academic, the drumming, and the beat, is something you simply “follow”. “You find yourself lost in what you’re listening to,” she said, in the aforementioned Tone Glow interview. It’s a philosophy that emphasises motion, and that’s the same quality Estradas exudes. 

It’s in the album name, which invokes roads, and on the album cover, too: we don’t see a vehicle, just the tyre marks of where it once was. The image suggests Nídia and Magaletti, two of the most forward-thinking artists making what we might call “drum music”, have sped off into the distance. That’s the beauty of Estradas: all we can do is try to keep up, and enjoy the cacophony left in their wake.

Lewis Gordon