Who knew that a bruise could come out in so many colours? On their new album two of the contemporary music scene’s most daring percussionists in Valentina Magaletti and YPY render both pummelling blows and the resulting hematomas in a dazzling array of shades from pinkish reds, sapphire blues and snotty greens to vibrant neons which flit across the screen like gossamer fractals.
Magaletti’s drums have a distinctive punchiness which hits right in the pit of your stomach even as her deft blows soften up the rest of your body while YPY’s assorted electronic palette is more amorphous, from smears and glitches to the droning hum of an overhead LED with its fluctuating voltage. So together they rumble and buzz or to reverse the equation, float like a butterfly and sting like a bee while evoking such images as that of a neon filament or thread perpetually reflected in an oil slick.
While the album’s title Kansai BruisesĀ might immediately suggest the bustling cosmopolitan city of Osaka or the more refined pleasures of Kyoto with its wooden houses and temples, it is the hallucinatory dash of the record opener ‘One Hour Visa’ which most clearly maps out everything on street level as YPY’s gleaming electronics suffuse the madcap scene. The futuristic bent of Kansai BruisesĀ frequently suggests video games from the free roam neon and smoke of Infamous Second Son to the locked-in parkour of Mirror’s Edge or from the barrelling rolls and destructible crates of Crash Bandicoot to the wormholes and malign superintelligence of Portal.
On the other hand Magaletti and YPY imbue Kansai Bruises with a dislocationary quality that stretches beyond notions of contemporary sheen, retrofuturism or gilded historicism. Their music might at times summon up the psychedelia of Tatusya Yoshida, the steeped and solitary rituals of Eli Keszler or the sheer rambunctiousness of Weasel Walter who like Yoshida deals in his own brand of ‘brutal prog’ but beyond such names and extremities or the iconic free jazz benchmark Milford Graves this duo display a deep connection to jazz music’s wider source codes and currents. The title track ‘Kansai Bruises’ for instance captures the raptures and blemishes of a night on the tiles while also encompassing West African rhythms through its resonant echo of djembe drums.
The prolific Valentina Magaletti is already on her umpteenth record of the past year as duets with the outsider trio Jeugdbrand, the PrĆncipe producer NĆdia and the poet Fanny Chiarello have slotted in alongside releases by her working bands Vanishing Twin, Holy Tongue and Moin. Koshiro Hino or YPY meanwhile continues to garner a cult following for his efforts at the head of goat (jp) and Kakuhan. Both artists currently run boutique labels with Magaletti and Chiarello collaborating for the women-only imprint permanent draft while Hino steers the Japanese label Nakid which has issued music by kindred spirits such as Keith Fullerton Whitman, Mark Fell and Will Guthrie.
After the winning one-two punch of the opening tracks, another standout in ‘Lantern Lit Run’ pushes through a wall of invisible static before apparently ceding to machine learning, as the composition seems to begin to generate its own momentum and effects. From the mid-point of the piece a dubby wobble accompanies laden cymbal reverberations, pummelling kicks and all those electronic blips and beeps. ‘Her Own Reflection’ is more fruity, at times redolent of both the Afro-Cuban clave with its interplay between triple and duple pulses and the shifting dynamics of gamelan gong kebyar, with the word ‘kebyar’ in Balinese meaning ‘to flash’ or ‘to flare up and burst upon’. And the briefer ‘Silhouette’ fashions dry and muted rattlesticks.
‘Interlude for Fog Days’ begins like an old game of Pong but steadily exceeds its frame, gathering pace to sound like the play of particles in a large hadron collider. And as Kansai Bruises draws to a yellowing or silvery close, the album endpoint ‘Pesto’ continues in the same ping-ponging manner with a few more bells and accoutrements and with a nod to Italian home comforts, as Magaletti and YPY cook and clatter among their chosen kitchenware.
