Rave Review: upsammy & Valentina Magaletti - Seismo
The natural world is a tumultuous space. On a macro scale, change can feel plodding, even mundane—but at the micro level, everything is in constant upheaval. On Seismo, upsammy and Valentina Magaletti tap into that volatility, reshaping the nature of sound through a series of cataclysmic events—accelerating the collapse of traditional forms to reveal something new beneath.
The album opens at the end. “It Comes To An End” feels almost playful at first, its synth lines immediately recognizable as upsammy—bright, chiming, almost angelic. Beneath that surface, Magaletti’s skittering snares and rolling timpani destabilize the track, pulling it toward something more ominous. The mood curdles as it unfolds, signaling early that nothing here will remain settled for long.
From there, the record fractures. A dense, shifting mass of uncategorizable sounds and patterns takes hold, less a sequence of tracks than a continuous eruption. Rhythms flicker in and out of focus; structures form only to collapse. It carries the disorienting logic of a world in motion—closer to ecological upheaval than dancefloor linearity—yet there’s still a pulse buried within, something instinctual that keeps it tethered to the body.
That tension—between abstraction and physicality—is where Seismo thrives. upsammy’s textures remain tactile and vivid, like dew on leaves, shimmering and alive, while Magaletti’s percussion injects a restless, improvisational energy. The beats don’t simply drive; they scatter, ricochet, and reform, like intricate webs constantly being spun and torn apart. There are faint echoes of Objekt’s Cocoon Crush in the way detail accumulates into something immersive and destabilizing.
Even at its most chaotic, the album maintains a sense of intent. Tracks like “Hyperlocalize” zoom inward, mapping out a frenetic microcosm where every element feels on the verge of rupture. “Every Cell Thought Every Thinkable Thing” pushes that idea further, evoking systems that operate beyond perception—patterns that feel random but are anything but.
Magaletti proves an ideal counterpart throughout. Her presence is less about anchoring the music than agitating it, constantly shifting the ground beneath upsammy’s constructions. As a result, the album rarely settles into anything resembling a groove in the traditional sense—but it never fully abandons it either. Instead, it hovers in that in-between space, where rhythm is implied as much as it is heard.
By the time “Collide” arrives, the closest thing here to a club track, the record briefly snaps into focus. Percussion tightens, momentum builds, and the fragments cohere into something resembling forward motion—atoms striking, rebounding, reorganizing. It’s a fleeting moment of clarity, but an effective one.
“Some unimaginable World” closes the album by dissolving that energy once again. A softer rhythm emerges, accompanied by a gentle, almost luminous melody. It feels less like a resolution than a reset—the aftermath of impact, where new forms begin to take shape.
In the end, Seismo doesn’t aim to move the dancefloor in a conventional sense. Instead, it reconfigures it—pulling apart the mechanics of club music and exposing the unstable systems beneath. What remains is something fluid, unpredictable, and quietly radical: music that doesn’t just invite movement, but continuously reshapes the ground it moves on.
(The Lunatic is an Austin, Texas–based raver spreading the good word through his reviews and blog—and by selling the weirdest fucking electronic vinyl around.)
