Marinetti: Fortunato Durutti Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter LP

Known on both sides of the Atlantic for his baroque, poetic approach to songwriting, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti returns with Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter—his most sweeping, absurd, and emotionally acute statement to date. Calling it Poetic Jazz Rock—at once a private joke and an honest descriptor—the Toronto-via-Turin cantautore (Italian for singer-songwriter) delivers an album of maximalist grace, gilded sorrow, and lyrical intensity.

The title, Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, nods to Anne Carson’s Eros: The Bittersweet, a book that launches a thousand ideas into the air: the impossibility of translation, the contradictions at the heart of desire, and the fluid spectrum between seeming opposites. That duality animates this album—from its two-headed dog cover art to its songs that twirl between beauty and grotesquerie, euphoria and dread.

While his previous album, Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean, sought sonic hybridity, Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter marks Marinetti’s dive into excess. Written with the intent to push his songwriting to absurdist extremes, the album features long, chorus-less compositions swirling in 6/8 time, packed with words, brass, and string flourishes. Recorded live with a nimble six-piece band in a cramped Toronto attic studio, the record captures raw performances—often tracked in first or second takes—and overlays them with meticulous arrangements.