Merchants - Marrow (2024)

Merchants is an Italian electronic duo composed of Alberto Ricca aka Bienoise (Mille Plateaux, Red Bull Music Academy Tokyo alumnus) and Davide Amici. The duo was born in 2016 with the intention of conjuring the musical sensibilities and imaginations of non-existent countries through a sample-based approach dedicated to the allure for post-global debris.

After their first work on the Italian Yerevan Tapes, Merchants returns to Artetetra with a new collection expanding on their fictive exploration of new geographies. If previously the focus was on the archaeology of a past that never was, Marrow departs from hauntological interests. In the album, by exploiting all kinds of synthesizers (analog, digital and virtual or modular) Merchants probes the “pseudoacoustics” of invented instruments, mostly abusing the learnings of FM and physical modeling synthesis. These fictional instruments are then coupled with recordings of interlocking percussion, Sumerian horns, guitar arpeggios and field recordings alongside old folk music records and snippets stolen from the depth of the almighty YouTube archive.

Blended together and mixed into jams, these recordings are the workings of over seven years of sessions scattered over time, realized through an epistolary digital correspondence during which every new listening session lead to further revisiting, rearrangement and reinterpretation. Similarly to other new school projects using audio synthesis and sound design to explore fictive tunings and rhythmic arrangements, Merchants pushes towards the paradox, building a creative space where music extends through different historical, imaginary and lived timelines, endlessly folding on itself. A superimposition of different ages and technologies permeates the work siding the world's imagination of the digital underground with the universal need for mythological narratives. A slimy juxtaposition where everything is entangled and shifting: reconstruction and mimesis mesh with elliptical para-musicological fever and possible approximations of organologies. If the classical ethnic epic is an oral narrative, Marrow tries to obtain one by eschewing words and toying with listening and playing alone.

And indeed, this taste for narrative paradoxes and their tangledness unites in Marrow to the artists' passion for different systems of live role-playing, in which elements of worldbuilding and randomness model the rules of how time and space unfurls for the entities that inhabit them. As a narrative mechanic and central theme, Merchants use the structure of classic tabletop RPG systems, flipping them on their head to build an architecture based on the artists' fascination for abstraction, impossible games (owing much to the non-world of Anti-Sisyphus), inventory as storytelling and the roll of dice as a mercurial, amoral guide.

If the first album was in black and white, Marrow is pure technicolor. On this audiovisual map full of textual loopholes, caves and portals are synonyms, deserts are enclosed locations. Labyrinths and pathways mix in a delicate, continuous misdirection.

In order to contribute with an imaginative take on RPGs, maps and time-space deception, the release comes with a open board game of Marrow’s world conceived by Merchants, Artetetra and Riccardo Redeghieri and illustrated by Riccardo Redeghieri.

The album’s world and its paradoxes literally unfold on paper, where each song is mapped with a distinct interaction within the game, and each interaction is projected and hidden in the board.