* 2025 Stock, Edition of 200* A shadow falls over tradition as Monofonic Orchestra unveils Starless Variations - a work that distills homage and invention through the fevered lens of pianist Maurizio Marsico and electronic co-conspirator Massimo Mascheroni. The record’s first act is a document: a riveting live performance recorded in Milan, where Marsico’s piano arcs across the original “Starless” (King Crimson’s spectral anthem), continually derailed and adorned by Mascheroni’s tactile modulations. Expanding the bones of the prog classic, the ensemble conjures slow-burning atmospheres where hope and dissolution tread the same boards.
Yet this is no static tribute. The studio reimagining, explicitly titled “An Iversen Furthering,” catapults the source material further from recognizable shores. Here, cracks of static and microtonal colorations dissolve any lingering certainties; the piano’s amber glow is bathed in the machinery of memory, and every recurring motif is interrogated as if through a hall of cracked mirrors. Textures fold and fracture: ambient hiss, haunted electronics, and alloyed sibilance spiral around melodic shards - a visionary expansion authored with icy affection, where detachment becomes a form of integrity.
Starless Variations is best understood as an exorcism and a renewal: two variations mapping the still-burning embers of 1970s art rock onto our current dusk. Marsico’s performance, extending the original’s meditation into nearly forty minutes of ruminative space, is equal parts lament and speculative fiction. At every turn, the album asks what happens when musical “progress” circles back on itself, and what new weather patterns can be summoned by disrupting the logic of reprise.
A testament to refusal - of obvious nostalgia, of easy finality - Starless Variations pierces the twilight between citation and pure invention, always alert to new configurations of loss and promise. The result, paradoxically, is future-facing: a music that stands vigil just past the boundary where memory fades, awaiting the dawn with silent, unbroken intensity.
