After the dark clouds of the 0's the world was changing and Maurizio Marsico, fresh off New York sessions with Rhys Chatham, started the 80's with a couple of experimental records under the moniker Monofonic Orchestra, published by the cult label Italian Records, "Music Design" and "Friends' Portraits". Stefano Tamburini, the creator of the legendary Ranxerox comic hero painted by Tanino Liberatore, was an onlooker in disguise in New York Marsico's exhibitions, and back in Italy he crowned him this way on the pages of his Frigidaire magazine: "The best things I've heard in New York came from Monofonic Orchestra (the Italian Maurizio Marsico with guest stars): fuck compliments! Far from Glenn Branca and his bunch of avant-oratorical assholes guitarists". It was the beginning of a borderline friendship that beyond excesses found its glue mainly in the feverish and coloured creativity, in the dedication for the more or less subversive fragment's aesthetic, in the genial messing around. Tamburini (a genius killed by heroin in 1986) did a tape called "Thalido Music For Young Babies" with the moniker Mongoholy-Nazy, inside there were flashes of the marsican live in NY, Marsico after that came out with a 45 EP titled "Invito a Cena" on Frigidaire, and on the mag he wrote even some comics with the great Massimo Mattioli. Maurizio sings some songs with the lyrics by Stefano, in a serial killer love songs mood, they're called Tongue In Cheek Giulia, My Head Is A Broken Heart and Crish Crash, unreleased to this day, they seemed lost but now you can listen to them in all their lo-fi glory for the first time on this CD. In a tracklist that, through another unreleased triptych, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable goes new-wave of Luce bianca rumore bianco, the smooth Lunatica You and the urban Overground (these two respectively with guest-star such Gianluigi Trovesi at bass clarinet and Mauro Spina at drums), captures the most mutant and comics-like Marsico. "The Sunny Side Of The Dark Side" is the snap-shot of a momentary luna park, it shows the funny part of a story lived on the wild side of the street, with the excesses and the drugs that will lead to deaths or lives to rebuild, and documents the transition of the rising star of italian experimental music of early Eighties - with studies in jazz, electronics and ethnomusicology at Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan - towards borderline pop territories. They're the Eighties in all their post-modern boom, with the video-art, graffiti, rap explosions: Marsico is a comic made flesh and bones that moves fast and faster between television ("ObladЌ Oblad?" on the first Rai channel, where he counterpoints with strange sketches and out-there jingles a then newcomer and future TV star Serena Dandini while she reads a kind of avant-garde newscast) and the nightlife, that found him in Milan in clubs such Plastic, or everywhere his combustion brings him, like a quite dangerous party animal. In this context came to life tracks like Rap'n'Roll with the moniker Frisk The Frog, with the Mattioli comics version published on Frigidaire, who did also the lyrics of the track and the record's cover artwork: nowadays you can see the incredible video of Rap'n'Roll on youtube, it seems a hipster take on the 80's but it's the real shit. Or the two striking dada-surf releases with the immaculate production of La Bionda brothers, the Silver Surfin' 12" (mixed by Jurgen Koppers, at the controls with Moroder on Donna Summer's I Feel Love yet), a gem that mixes a motorik background with guitars, perfect melodies, TV jingles kind of sounds, that was played in its embryonic form in the infamous NY exhibition, and Takita-Kamati, a 45 made by Fontana, a now legendary trio made by Maurizio with Luca Majer and the sadly departed Al Aprile (with the bass of Les Hurdle, that played on Lou Reed's first album) an off-dance prodigy sung in maori language, or again the muscular electro of Funk Sumatra, that sounds as a boxing match between Afrika Bambaataa and Ranxerox and has an alike sleeve by Tanino Liberatore, or the italo-disco spleen of Baby Blue with the Soul Boy alias (these last two are collaborations with Luigi Macchiaizzano), the Art Of Noise goes cartoonia of Cow Cow done as The Space Boys, the two tracks from the soundtrack of "Mefistofunk", that was, as in the sleevenotes of the original LP, "the first electronic movie done in Italy", the Venus In Furs pastiche of Arredo Vestitivo, and Lucy's 1st Appointment, a kind of Lennie Tristano in electronic hallucination that sounds like the big bang of the marsican mutation. All cult stuff that at the times didn't find the commercial success but created an underground monster, and today brings us back the most playful and creative side of an artist that is now more actual and fresh than ever.
