Valentina Magaletti - La Tempesta Colorata

Having first issued it as a cassette in May of last year, A Colourful Storm does the noble thing in bringing Valentina Magaletti's 2021 live performance from Cafe OTO to vinyl for the first time. If there's a more expressive and inventive drummer in the world right now, then please draw me a map and point the way. Magaletti seems free of any cartographic convention. How to describe La Tempesta Colorata, a 45 min piece of such tangential exploration it's confounding as a listener to map from start to finish, let alone to conceive as a performer? Here Magaletti is, as ever, a great uniter of disciplines, making connections between improv/free jazz, dub, krautrock and metallic post-punk in ridiculously intuitive - sometimes improbable - ways. It's tricky to think of many contemporary equivalents, though listening to those recent Milford Graves reissues, i was struck by their shared free-wheeling but still-somehow-anchored approaches, knowing when to venture, always finding a way to return. You also get the sense here, that despite so much great work already, Magaletti's ever-probing approach means her best is somehow still down the road in front of her, the possibilities hard to quantify. What a thought!