*Edition of 160* “An album without titles is a blind date with the listener, who is forced to make an extra (or lesser) effort to clearly grasp both the evident and the more hidden elements of a track, in order to form a personal perception, uncontaminated by pseudo-literary or ‘programmatic’ elements.” “!?” is an album with an unpronounceable name, made up of tracks identified only by their duration, and the two tracks shortened in the vinyl version carry the longer duration that appears on the CD version, because they are still the same sonic photographs, albeit captured from another perspective.

"It’s like saying: a photo of the Cathedral without one spire is still a photo of the Cathedral. Why? To give greater emphasis to the music, without necessarily burdening it with an evocative title that has little to do with the raw (real?) sonic nature of the pieces. Because music is born from the composer, but it is completed in the ears of the listener, who has every right to hear or imagine whatever they wish. Because, without a title to guide us, it is harder to replay the tracks we prefer, and in searching for them we may be forced to linger on the rest—indeed, we may realize that what we had previously excluded perhaps we like even more. The most banal track can reveal surprising or deeply mysterious facets, while the most complex one can be lightened from cerebral ruminations. Because I have always loved John Cage’s 4’33” starting from the title itself, just like the untranslatable names of the artist otherwise known as Prince." - Maurizio Marsico

An irregular artist par excellence, Maurizio Marsico took his first steps in the days of the new wave between the late ’70s and early ’80s, in a colorful experimental journey that, with his one-man band Monofonic Orchestra, led him to intersect the most diverse sounds and modes of expression, from avant-garde to pop, passing through electronics and piano music. Between a classic album like the experimental Friends’ Portraits on Italian Records in 1981 and a series of eccentric singles flirting with hip-hop, electro, and italo-disco—later collected in 2017 in the compilation The Sunny Side Of The Dark Side—as well as soundtracks for theater and cinema, extraordinary TV appearances like that on Obladì Obladà on Rai 1, and the sonic support for the cult magazine Frigidaire, Marsico embodies one of the most bizarre and avant-garde figures of the ’80s. A truly new musical phase began less than ten years ago, from the total music masked as electronics in Post_Human Folk Music (2018) to the situationist wave of The Greatest Nots (2020) with Stefano Di Trapani, through Carnival (2022) with Roger Stanza (and contributions from new collaborators like the industrial act ODRZ), and the pianistic reinterpretation of King Crimson’s Starless Variations (2024).

“!?” is the result of a collaboration with Mauro Tondini, already a co-producer of several of Marsico’s recent works, here forming a creative tandem that has given birth to a truly unclassifiable album. The absence of titles brings out a disorienting synthetic score where baroque airs and sarabandes coexist with gospel balanced between tragic and comic, pure electronics, grooves that mock the contemporaneity of social media and influencers, and a cover of Todd Rundgren’s Wailing Wall that overlays Western emotionality with citations of Beth Carvalho’s Velho Ateu, as if to suggest an underlying saudade that runs through the entire album.