In the first year of the pandemic, London’s Café Oto launched a digital label whose revenues benefited this central hub for adventurous music from the UK capital and the rest of the world as well as the artists involved. Valentina Magaletti also contributed a release to Takuroku in late 2020. Although the drummer had been anything but inactive in previous years as a member of Tomaga, Holy Tongue, Vanishing Twin and, more recently, Moin, among others, »A Queer Anthology of Drum« was special: in a sense, it was Magaletti’s first solo release. At least in this case then, the forced self-isolation of the first pandemic months resulted in something positive. The Chinese label bié has now released the album on vinyl, along with a new track. »She/Her/Gone« opens this new version with a lot of rustling, tinkling piano sounds and, of course, subtle percussion—a The Necks piece in condensed form, so to speak. A similar playful, airy density also characterises the following pieces, for which Magaletti makes use of a vibraphone, toys or oscillators, among other things, in addition to her main tools, and thus sometimes dives into electro-acoustic sound worlds. But the focus is on her playing on drums and percussion, which is equally rooted in improv traditions as it always makes concessions to, well, catchier styles from jazz to post-rock—or sometimes steps back, making room in which the sound can unfold. »A Queer Anthology of Drum« is supposed to be the document of a journey that never took place. It leads through the world of an exceptional artist who is only very rarely active as a solo artist. All the better that this LP is now being made available to the general public.
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