Valentina Magaletti & Laila Sakini - Cupo

Two of the leading voices of London's new Avant Garde come together for a multifaceted and supple first time collaboration. That neither Magaletti nor Sakini are British natives tells you a little about the capital's enduring draw as creative nexus, but probably reveals more about the pair's shared musical plurality - here's two artists with a wide lensed, venturing perspective that's as worldly as the city they inhabit. Magaletti's CV is near-infinite at this stage, and there's few avenues she's yet to explore. Unsurprisingly, then, that this latest outing on Cupo sees her indulge ever-experimental impulses, uniting her overlapping interests in free-jazz fluidity, ghostly dub, musique concrete radicalism and modern classical grandiosity. Sakini proves an ideal foil for such explorations, her wraith-like presence tying together the disparate urges into an enigmatic, foggy pulse where distant vocal intonations blur with scraping strings, piano trills and rolling, off-centre percussion. It makes for a grand and ambitious union, slightly unmoored at times, perhaps even centre-less. As such, Cupo never returns to any specific idea, more free-ranging and boundary-less, searching for new ground at the peripheries, that, as it happens, is not unlike the city that birthed it.