Maurizio Marsico - Clandestine adventures on the fringes of italo-disco

Milanese multi-instrumentalist Maurizio Marsico was a semi-clandestine pioneer of Italy's first disco-pop season (italo-disco), moving effortlessly from his stints at Rai alongside Serena Dandini on the 80s TV show “Obladì Obladà”, to the most unabashed disco sounds – often teetering between irony and trash – all the way to a host of collaborations spanning the avant-garde and cosmic music. After a few years away, in 2017 he returned with “The Sunny Side Of The Dark Side”, an album that harks back to the early years of his career, followed by a cosmic collaboration with Italian synth maestro Riccardo Sinigaglia (“Nature spontanee”), and finally by the very recent “Post Human Folk Music”. We talked about this and more in the following interview.

It might sound strange to say today, in an age when fame is measured in follower counts and the so-called entertainment world is packed with people who are famous for being famous before they're anything else, but in my case ambition was never the driving force. What mattered was the irrepressible urge to express my own musical perspective, believing it to be just as valid as countless others. Sonic imagination has always been the "sacred fire" that drove me, and that still drives me today, to do what I do and to throw myself into the projects I choose to take on. It's both the starting point and the final destination, regardless of how it's received, more or less objectively. Music for music's sake, art for art's sake. Sure, if people like what I do, I'm happy about it, very happy even, but I've never budged an inch, and never will, just to get a bit more approval or to please anyone... To paraphrase Area: my machine gun is the synthesizer that fires what I think about life straight into your face. Today just as much as back then, maybe even more so.

You've always been fascinated by technology as a useful tool for realizing your artistic ideas and expanding your possibilities. Needless to say how much the world has changed since you started out; do you really think musicians today are freer to express themselves than they were 40 years ago?

Deep down, things haven't changed all that much. Freedom of expression is first and foremost a matter of mind, spirit and body, and tools were, are, and remain just that – tools, capable of granting exactly the level of freedom you decide to have, or deserve to have. You can remain conservative, even in music, despite having the latest technological gear at your disposal, just as you can become innovative by using traditional instruments in unconventional ways. You can use a knife to cut a piece of bread or to prune a rose, as a screwdriver, as a weapon of self-defense, or worse, of aggression. The new eurorack modules allow for an infinite number of connections, multiplied by an infinite number of options. And freedom, in this case too, mostly means freedom of choice. Whether or not to choose to go beyond your own comfort zone and your own clichés. You might even decide to switch off the machine and start whistling like a finch on amphetamines, only to discover that, in that particular moment, that was exactly the right thing to do.

You've recorded an exorbitant number of albums – I read in your interview with Solchi Sperimentali Italy that there are around forty albums under different pseudonyms, often impossible to find. Doesn't this prolificacy seem at odds with this kind of camouflage under different names?

The real subject of my work and my research, with and about music, is precisely the fragmentation of its wholeness (from conception all the way to finalization, reproduction, formats, etc.). Fragmentation as a recombinant ability, not as a disintegrating force. Fragmentation of substance and form, and even of the most marginal and peripheral elements pertaining to form (names, titles, formats, promo videos, cover art, posters, etc.), treated as interconnected yet autonomous fragments, to then be recomposed, recombined, resounded, re-recorded, regenerated. For me, fragmentation isn't the result of some eccentric restlessness, but a precise reason for being, born out of an organic artistic/musical vision. It's the convergence of the manifold. And all of us, today more than ever, are multitude – we might as well come to terms with it.

In recent years you've returned with the compilation of older tracks, “The Sunny Side Of The Dark Side” (2017), which sums up the best of your old '80s output, and, in the same year, a project tied to cosmic music with one of the genre's Italian pioneers, Riccardo Sinigaglia (“Nature spontanee”). Two LPs completely different from one another that represent two sides of your personality?

Exactly, two sides of the same personality. But which sides, of which me? Who am I, even?

“Post Human Folk Music” is your brand-new album, which contains “Sticky Metal Tiles”, an ambitious 45-minute track, a long collage rich in influences. What does Maurizio Marsico want to tell us today, after more than 40 years of career?

If I could have told you, I would certainly have said it, or maybe written it in a book. A record of almost entirely instrumental music is, unfortunately or fortunately, "unspeakable" by definition. What I can absolutely and sincerely tell you, though, is that I really enjoyed thinking it through, playing it and recording it, and I truly hope that same enthusiasm can reach your ears too, with as few filters as possible, along with whatever of mine you manage to grasp and whatever of your own it might bring back to the surface.

The other two tracks reference the minimalist master Terry Riley; what has Riley, and the American minimalist school in general, meant to you?

Repetition as a way of changing, especially the auditory approach to music. The use of overlapping melodic-rhythmic patterns, which, like insinuating mantras, dismantled the conventional (Western) way of listening in favour of a transcendent (Eastern) mode of perception. A gentle revolution of which Terry Riley (an exceptional composer and a lovable human being) was one of the leading champions.

You often talk about technology - what do you think of the new generations born with iPhones, do you think they're luckier? Is it possible to think of a proportional, or perhaps inverse, correlation between technology and creativity?

The new generations are used to technological upgrades as an everyday matter. For our generation, the Walkman or the VCR were staggering inventions that also helped change the way we lived, but never as much as smartphones, electric cars or sharing in general have. For millennials, the relationship with technology is deeper and more layered; for us, deep down, those were just things, or simple television sets - household appliances, in any case nothing that could stop us from going out of the house all the same. It's encounter, comparison and sometimes clash that are the real salt of creativity. Whether you get it via Skype or at the Deux Magots in Paris, in the end it's the same thing.

I think irony has been an important element in your discography. Is that part of your character, or is there also a critique of overly academic music?

Actually, a bit of both. If I didn't feel so happily unclassifiable, I could just as easily recognise myself in the most "academic" of rockers or the most rock 'n' roll of academics. Or, put simply: alternative to the alternative. Jokes aside, Academia with a capital A is above all a state of mind that doesn't only concern institutional fiefdoms. You can catch its stench both above and below the lectern.

What do you think of the contemporary music scene - are there any scenes you follow with particular interest?

I really like the Hauntology genre and the whole Ghost Box roster, especially The Belbury Poly, The Advisory Circle, The Focus Group; I also think some of my early records (in particular Music Design, Friends Portraits and Invito a Cena) could, to all effects, though unwittingly, be described as forerunners of the genre. Then there's a musician I particularly admire and respect, both for his talent and his flashes of genius, and with whom I'd love to put together a collaborative work as soon as possible: his name is Stefano di Trapani, aka System Hardware Abnormal, aka Demented Burrocacao. In him I recognised the marks of a genuine artistic restlessness, someone to talk sounds and notes with.

In the '60s, and for part of the '70s, it was believed that music could help change the world. Things have since changed, but some musicians still hold a critical stance towards contemporary society (I recently saw the wonderful Roger Waters concert). Do you think music has to carry messages with it, or do you think - like John Cage, who said that music is just sound - that the two things need to be kept separate?

In a world that is ever more meanly human, even as it keeps perpetually changing; ever more unequally governed, even as it grows technologically advanced; ever more ruled by profit, even as it lies naturally dying, the wonderful uselessness of music is at the same time its most priceless value, like the last smile of the last white rhinoceros.

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