Born in Turin and based in Toronto, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti (Daniel Colussi’s new moniker after Pinc Lincolns or The Shilohs) playied in various bands for the last twenty years, and quietly self-released solo albums. Memory’s Fool, a small, complete and in-depth work on the relationship between the sounds of the past and the present, a small philosophical treatise and his second release under this name (following 2020’s Desire) was his first time working with proper label support. Drawing inspiration from the restless, explorative spirit of 1970s songwriters like Lou Reed, Robert Wyatt and Joni Mitchell, Marinetti chose to first wrote all the lyrics before assembling a hybrid pickup band of jazz, folk and rock musicians to render his songs into a form he calls “poetic jazz rock”. And indeed, Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean, his 2023 album and its first for Quindi Records is poetic jazz rock of the highest order. Known on both sides of the Atlantic for his baroque, poetic approach to songwriting, now Fortunato Durutti Marinetti returns with Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, out via Quindi Records on July 25th, 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. Today he unveils the first single from the album, Full Of Fire.

What He Says: “A song originally recorded as a dirge for my second album, Memory’s Fool. It ended up getting left off the album but I felt so attached to it that I put the lyrics on the back sleeve of the LP. But I still couldn’t let it go, so I rewrote the chords and dropped a verse and we recorded it for Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter.  The band got it on the first take. I love Luan’s guitar solo. As the opening track of the album, it serves as a kind of statement of intent for the record: amour fous, Thelma & Louise, mutually assured destruction.“

The Album: Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter
“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.
Inspired by the iconoclasts— Annette Peacock, Rickie Lee Jones, Donald Byrd, Brigitte Fontaine, Fabrizio De André — Marinetti follows his craft wherever it leads. There are echoes of Destroyer and Tindersticks here, but also something singularly his: Maximally Graceful Funky Eloquence, as he puts it.
The songs on Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter grapple with empathy, ego, surveillance, spiritual exhaustion, and love in its various shades of delusion. Lead single Full of Fire opens the album with an explosive ode to romantic recklessness in the tradition of Thelma & Louise. Elsewhere, Beware offers bitter advice for bitter times, Call Me the Author references Joan Didion by way of Brigitte Fontaine, and My Funeral imagines a self-delivered eulogy set to sombre jazz-noir. The instrumental themes (Theme I and Theme II) give the band room to stretch, underscoring the record’s musical vitality.
The album features contributions from a revolving cast of heavy-hitters, including New Chance (co-vocals on Beware) and Jay Arner (clavinet on Beware), who also mixed the entire record. A longtime friend and collaborator of Colussi’s, Arner (of Energy Slime, also on We Are Time) brings a deep familiarity to this fourth recorded collaboration, giving Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter its surreal, shimmering final polish.” 

The Tracklist:

1. Full of Fire
2. Beware
3. Do You Ever Think?
4. Call Me The Author
5. Theme I (Alex’s Theme)
6. A Perfect Pair
7. A Rambling Prayer
8. Theme II
9. My Funeral

Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter will be out on July 25th, 2025 via Quindi Records. Look HERE for more information on Fortunato Durutti Marinetti.