Bio — Valentina Magaletti

VALENTINA MAGALETTI

BIO / RELEASES/ GALLERY/ SHOWS/ VIDEOS/ PERMANENT DRAFT/ CONTACT

Valentina Magaletti is a queer drummer, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and curator who treats percussion as a political and poetic instrument—an unruly body that refuses straight lines, fixed identities, and normative rhythms. Her work dismantles the boundaries between noise, ritual, and music, transforming ceramics, found objects, and skin-based textures into tools for resistance and queer world-building.

Beyond performance, Magaletti’s curatorial vision has become a vital extension of her practice. In 2023–2024, she curated Variations in Nantes, a programme exploring percussive possibility across experimental music and performance. She took on the role of curator for Le Guess Who? 2025 in Utrecht, one of Europe’s most forward-thinking festivals. In 2026, she will curate at Public Records New York, and since 2022 she has been a recurring curator of her residency at Cafe OTO (London), shaping lineups that reflect her commitment to unstable, soft, asymmetric, and defiant sonic worlds.

Her compositional reach extends into fashion and film. In 2026, Magaletti creates original music for Issey Miyake at Pitti Uomo (Florence), and for Lemaire’s 2026 presentations. That same year, she completes a commission for independent films and Documentaries and contributes a site-responsive work for the opening of KANAL in Brussels—one of Europe’s most anticipated new art institutions.

Magaletti moves fluidly between experimental, improvised, and popular music, collaborating with artists including Loraine James,upsammy,Nidia, Mica Levi, Lafawndah, Nicolas Jaar, Philip Selway(Radiohead),Deb Googe(MBV),Thurston Moore,Jandek, Fred Frith,Pat Thomas and Floating Point to name a few.

Yet it is in her solo practice—most notably A Queer Anthology of Drums—that her politics become most explicit: a collage of breath, field recordings, and percussive debris that explores queer embodiment as both vulnerability and defiance. Her playing rejects the militaristic, the disciplined, the patriarchal; instead it embraces instability, softness, asymmetry, and the sonic textures of survival.

For Magaletti, drumming is not accompaniment—it is autobiography. A living archive of queer gesture, memory, and refusal, unfolding through vibration rather than language.
In addition to collaborating with the gamelan Ensemble Nist-Nah and drummers Malcom Catto, Julian Sartorius and Charles Hayward, she has played with stalwarts of the experimental underground scene including Gnod’s Marlene Ribeiro, Wire’s Graham Lewis, and Thighpaulsandra (Coil).Valentina participated in The Can Project, standing in for the late Jaki Liebezeit at London’s Barbican Centre.

Magaletti’s compositional credits are just as elaborate: with Tom Relleen, she was one half of Tomaga, the critically acclaimed electronic duo; with Al Wootton, she creates irresistible claustrophobic dub as Holy Tongue; with Pino Montecalvo, under the Avvitagalli alias, Valentina improvises intricate sonic collages; alongside percussionist João Pais Filipe, as CZN, she constructs hallucinatory rhythmic worlds, as fragile as they are eternal.

Perhaps her most accessible project is Vanishing Twin, the trio with Cathy Lucas and Susumu Mukai aka Zongamin, exploring the spaces bridging jazz and psychedelia. In contrast, Better Corners – Valentina’s remote collaboration with Matthew Simms (Wire, Memorials) and Sarah Register (Kim Gordon Band) – utilises an array of treated sound sources like prepared piano, flutes, and modular boxes to generate abrasive drone-laden soundscapes.

Following the impulse to explore uncharted territories, Magaletti teamed up with production duo Raime. Christening the project Moin, the trio created Moot! for Nic Tasker’s AD 93 label in 2021, followed by Paste in 2022 and You Never End (2024).The trio signed to 4AD in 2026.

As a solo artist Valentina often investigates texture. Batterie Fragile (unjenesaisquoi, 2022) sees the percussionist play a ceramic drum kit conceived by Yves Chaudouët, using wire brushes, wooden reeds and rubber beaters to summon unusual sonic characteristics from porcelain. In a similar vein, A Queer Anthology of Drums (Permanent Draft, 2024) – originally released on Cafe OTO's Takuroku imprint – reflects on her queer identity, the ritualistic aspects of improvisation, and the oppressive realities of lockdown life by collaging low-fi drones, field recordings and modulated percussive objects. The result is a melancholy montage bearing traces of influence from Dada, Surrealism, and Art Brut.

Recent projects include a book by Fanny Chiarello, Basta Now. Women, Trans & Non-Binary in Experimental Music, as well as collaborative releases with Nidia, Shackleton, YPY (Goat Japan), and upsammy.

Magaletti has performed widely at festivals including: Casa del Lago (Mexico City), Sonar (Barcelona), Waking Life (Crato), Lincoln Center (New York), LAX Art (Los Angeles), Wattis (San Francisco), Mode Festival at Sogetsu Hall (Tokyo), Unsound (Toronto/Krakow/New York), Wysing Arts Centre (Cambridge), Kappa Futur (Turin), Atonal (Berlin), Festival International Musiques Actuelle (Victoriaville), Festival de la Cité (Lausanne), Museum of Modern Art (Moscow), The Great Escape (Brighton), Incubate Festival (Tilburg), Nuits Sonores (Lyon), Hyperreality (Vienna), Dekmantel (Amsterdam), Tauron Nowa Muzyka (Katowice), Bozar (Brussels), EcoFestival (Madrid), Loop Festival (Los Angeles), Phono Festival (Odense), Tremor (Azores), Roskilde (Roskilde), Jazz is Dead (Turin), Le Guess Who? (Utrecht), Rewire (The Hague), Glastonbury, Supersonic (Birmingham), Sonar Reykjavik, Time Zones (Bari), Tempo Reale (Florence).

Other performance highlights include presentations at Biennale di Venezia, Cafe OTO (London), ICA, Zabludowicz Collection (London), Barbican (London), Southbank Centre (London), National Theatre and Dance (Lisbon), Sonoscopia (Porto), VAC (Palazzo Delle Zattere, Venice). She has performed and composed music for choreographers Kat Valastur and Marco da Silva Ferreira, for the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and has released music on labels including Editions Mego, Trilogy Tapes, Honest Jons, Flee Offen, Takuroku, Marionette, Hands in the Dark, Blank Editions, Confront, Latency, Meakusma, Emotional Response, Other People, Soundway, Fire Records, AD93, and many more.

Valentina Magaletti is based in London.

For all publishing enquiries please contact:
Simon Ballard – simon.ballard@mute.com

For all bookings please contact:
Meri Bonastre – meri@futura-artists.com
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