Fortunato Durutti Marinetti: Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean

Like fellow outliers, Björn Magnusson, Burner Herzog and Michael Plater, Daniel Colussi is completely entrenched in his own creative enclave. Unconcerned about trends and scenes around him, this attitude not only makes his art under the Fortunato Durutti Marinetti moniker more honesty, but also authentic; and on his latest record, Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean, the Turin, Toronto-based shapeshifter puts his best foot forward.

Harnessed by another outlier in Sandro Perri, the match is one that fits like a glove. A seamless alliance where two free spirits cross-pollinate their own ideas, and on Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean, Colussi produces vignettes containing sharp wit, pervasive charm and just the right dose of scorn. It’s something you’d expect from a jazz house band, and backed by an army of guests who provide a plethora of strings and brass, this is the sort of ironic soundtrack to a coffee shop full of hipsters sipping lattes.

“Lightning on a sunny day,” sings Colussi on the opening track of the same title. Instantly your drawn into the artist’s sharp contrast which features all throughout the album, and here, sonically, the track echoes similar sentiments to Dan Bejar’s Destroyer – a glorious apocalypse brought about by a hideous cynicism.

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It continues during The Flowers – a strings heavy swoon seemingly delivered by a broken-hearted wedding singer (“What am I supposed to say to this drained boutique that you gave me?”). And while the Dylan-inspired Misfit Streams is filled with slow synths that sink into the bones, it feels like an artist reading their own eulogy.

Meanwhile The Move of Your Life sees Perry’s airy atmospheres form the perfect backdrop to these songs. There’s more wedding chatter, this time the protagonist walking in on the groom and bridesmaid in a bathroom. It’s these tragic snapshots of black comedy that are cross between the majesty of John Kennedy Toole and Kingsley Amis.

Then there’s the wonderful Clerk of Oblivion. A song filled with the kind of summer vitality where poolside pina coladas are flowing. Well, sonically at least, as the protagonist is having quite the time – a henchmen at heaven’s gates in another story that is dotted with wonderful absurdity.

So too Smash Your Head Against the Wall – space cowboy psych where Colussi’s uses a nest of vipers as a composite for the circus that is this life, as reptiles proceed to piss on each other in more abstract madness that takes the ideas of Bejar one step further.

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Tomorrow’s Poem brings it all down. A dimmed light ballad strangled by melancholy and misery, feeding into closing cut, I Need You More. An epic love song that pushes and pulls, I Need You More swings from vampires inspired by True Blood to sailors longing for love. Yes, it’s more beautiful madness, but that’s life and on Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean, Colussi illuminates the chaos of it.

Perhaps he puts it best during The Movie of Your Life, where he sings, “The movie of your life has unspooled on the floor you’ll never get it back into the cannister.” True of course, and whether you see Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean as a crooning intangible delight from an alternative universe or a wonderful play on ideas in this one, either way Fortunato Durutti Marinetti has produced something shrewdly appealing.

Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean is out now via Quindi Records / Soft Abuse. Purchase from Bandcamp.