A clinking sound like hammer on metal enters my headphones as if a blacksmith working in a medieval village is bleeding into my train hurtling across twenty-first century London. It’s swiftly joined by a deep, sonorous bounce of bass and beats. They could be throbbing through the walls of a club, but their groove is strangely rubbery for drum machines and electronics. A scuffed vocal sample jags in, more like an apparition than a loop or rhythm. The opening track on Merchants’ Marrow, ‘The Council Below’ is a soundscape which evades specifics of time or place.
The second album by the duo of Alberto Ricca (who also produces music solo as Bienoise) and Davide Amici, Marrow is inspired by the pair’s shared fascination with live role-playing. Complex fictional worlds navigated by chance in the form of a dice. This fantastical intent is backed by the album coming packaged as a tape, download, or a tabletop RPG poster illustrated by Riccardo Redeghieri.
Sonically, Marrow manifests as a technicolour fusion of analogue and digital instruments. The release notes mention that FM synthesis, old folk records and YouTube samples are in the mix. But such is the blurred montage Merchants make, it’s tough to pinpoint specific sources. Soundscapes from divergent centuries and locations get quantised into a singularity. Like the palimpsestic mythologies of an RPG, perhaps.
The rising dank of second track ‘Quinnabar’ is propelled atop martial beats and an abraded stringed instrument. ‘Weaving the Snakes’ and ‘Desert Magnet’ are more lurid. A greater range of stringed, hammered, synthesised and acoustic sounds entering the propulsive stew. The longest track, ‘Honey Birds’, voyages from twinkling keys into high-speed percussion, a seeming tightrope walk towards a celestial power-up. ‘Mortar Song’ is plain sinister. Pounding drums and infernal electronics meet murky vocal incantations.
Merchants’ music comes from the world-building strategies of RPGs, while the outcome is perfectly tuned to our hyperconnected, endlessly expanding archive of an age. When distinctions between local and global are upended and sounds from geographically remote traditions can be accessed with ease and easily accessed out of context. Merchants’ music unashamedly reflects that moment and plays with the overlapping sonic tapestry on offer.
It’s emblematic of a vibrant scene hovering around the Italian underground. An occasionally affiliated web of artists working in off-kilter synthesis, Jon Hassell-recalling fourth world excursions, field recording and online plunderphonics to make music which harmonises disjunctive logics. Strands of this could be heard in Rainbow Island, Babau, and the discography of the label that duo curate, Artetetra (who are releasing Marrow). Sonically distinct, these artists all make music which is too disruptive to be ambient. In communion with traditions without being retro. Global in view without being appropriative in intent. Reflecting the overlapping terrain rather than cutting out a piece to claim for their own ends. Merchants’ Marrow is a compelling example. An album which makes its own peculiar sense.
