Marinetti, Fortunato Durutti

Marinetti, Fortunato Durutti

Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter

We Are Time

***Known on both sides of the Atlantic for his baroque, poetic approach to songwriting, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti returns with Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter—his most sweeping, absurd, and emotionally acute statement to date. Calling it Poetic Jazz Rock—at once a private joke and an honest descriptor—the Toronto-via-Turin cantautore (Italian for singer-songwriter) delivers an album of maximalist grace, gilded sorrow, and lyrical intensity.The title, Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, nods to Anne Carson’s Eros: The Bittersweet, a book that launches a thousand ideas into the air: the impossibility of translation, the contradictions at the heart of desire, and the fluid spectrum between seeming opposites. That duality animates this album—from its two-headed dog cover art to its songs that twirl between beauty and grotesquerie, euphoria and dread.While his previous album, Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean, sought sonic hybridity, Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter marks Marinetti’s dive into excess. Written with the intent to push his songwriting to absurdist extremes, the album features long, chorus-less compositions swirling in 6/8 time, packed with words, brass, and string flourishes. Recorded live with a nimble six-piece band in a cramped Toronto attic studio, the record captures raw performances—often tracked in first or second takes—and overlays them with meticulous arrangements.

Marinetti, Fortunato Durutti

Eight Waves in Search of An Ocean

Soft Abuse

Born in Turin and based in Toronto, Daniel Colussi has been playing in underground bands within various subterranean communities for the last twenty years. Adopting the nom de guerre Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, he self-released the Desire cassette in 2020, which was quickly followed with Memory’s Fool (Soft Abuse/Bobo Integral) in 2022 and the Desire LP (Second Spring), also 2022. The third Fortunato Durutti Marinetti album is titled Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean and it arrives November 2023 via Quindi Records and Soft Abuse. Colussi draws inspiration from the restless, explorative spirit of 1970s songwriters such as Robert Wyatt, Annette Peacock and Lou Reed -- artists more committed to the spirit of their own individual expression than to genre tropes. Working with producer Sandro Perri, the intention with Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean was to pursue an organic-hybridity in which synthesizers, saxophones and violins coalesce into an unified whole. On first single “Clerk Of Oblivion,” fretless bass brings a smooth funkiness to the rigidity of a vintage drum machine rhythm. On the epic opening track “Lighting On A Sunny Day” oscillating synthesizer tones pulse and sweep alongside violins and treated saxophone. “I Need You More” closes out the record on a breaking wave of dubby, decaying grandeur and features a massive flute solo. Each of these eight songs is a world unto itself, a vista to explore. Always changing but always familiar, Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean continues Colussi’s exploration of what he calls “poetic...

Marinetti, Fortunato Durutti

Memory's Fool

Soft Abuse

Born in Turin and based in Toronto, Marinetti has been playing in bands of varying degrees of obscurity for the last twenty years, frequently touring North America in his Volvo station wagon and quietly self-releasing albums to an oblivious and oversaturated marketplace. Memory’s Fool is his second release under his own name (following 2020’s Desire) and his first time working with proper label support. Drawing inspiration from the restless, explorative spirit of 1970s songwriters like Lou Reed, Robert Wyatt and Joni Mitchell, Marinetti chose to first write all the lyrics before assembling a hybrid pickup band of jazz, folk and rock musicians to render the songs of Memory’s Fool into a form he calls “poetic jazz rock”. And indeed, Memory’s Fool is poetic jazz rock of the highest order. Across it’s seven patiently composed and meticulously recorded tracks, each song on Memory’s Fool unfolds like a small essay or miniature treatise that focuses on inescapable human themes such as: sex, death, relationships, discovering who you are, feeling hurt, feeling confused. We are all Memory’s Fool.