BLOG 18/12/2018
The Jan Diaries — The Many Faces of Marco Passarani
For the December 2018 entry of The Jan Diaries, Jan Kinčl wrote a guided tour through the discography of Marco Passarani — Roman producer, label boss and one half of Tiger & Woods — tied to the Italian’s appearance at a Red Bull Presents night at the Steel club in Rovinj. It starts with a memory: around 2004 or 2005, at a party at Zagreb’s Student Centre organised by Sergej Lugović and Pytzek, Kinčl helped Davor Ostojić prepare a live set in Ableton — and then watched the evening’s main guest, Passarani, hit the room with every record he played.
What the piece covers
The portrait is drawn through seven records. The Detroit-facing beginnings: Roma Meets Detroit EP with Matteo Monteduro (Generator Records, 1993) and, the same year, Saga Pt. 1 under the name Passarani 2099 — the release that launched his Nature Records label and the Final Frontier distribution, with the track Ixora folding British IDM and Detroit synths into something openly emotional. There is the one-off M.Chrome Cosmic Traveler EP (Generator, 1995), a homage to Submerge and Underground Resistance, and Roofs as Analog Fingerprints (2003) on his own Pigna Records. At the centre stands Sullen Look (Peacefrog, 2005), which Kinčl calls the magnum opus of the catalogue — Detroit techno shaking hands with Dutch electro, italo disco, funk and house.
The later chapters show the range: a 2010 remix for Soul Designer on Third Ear, in the company of Underground Resistance, Luke Slater and Fluxion, and Through The Green (Running Back, 2011), the first album by Tiger & Woods, the sample-driven duo with Valerio Del Prete that began in secrecy and was built on old funk, disco and boogie records. The column also notes what was coming next: Passarani’s first solo album in fourteen years, announced for 2019 on Vladimir Ivković’s Offen Music.
The part that stayed
What holds the pseudonyms together, in Kinčl’s reading, is a producer who helped build the infrastructure of early Italian techno while never settling into a single sound. His verdict is compact: “Techno, funk, house, italo disco, electro… Marco zaista zna što radi” — Marco really knows what he is doing.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Seven minutes.