Music for Music: Marco Susino
Marco Susino: Timeless/Ahead of the Times
By Dan Ursini ©2026
Marco Susino is a classically trained composer and a Juilliard Continuing Guest Artist. Even more, Orchestral Tools employs him in the development of expressive instruments for scoring used by composers, producers, and sound designers worldwide. In July, his album Inanimate Subjects will be released. It is exceptional in the scope and depth of its integration of electronic treatments with the sounds of chamber music instruments. The resulting music is a hybrid sonic blend of great passion, candor, and power.
And it is exceptional in another fundamental way: It deals with deep personal loss. Artists usually require years or decades of distance from such a crisis before making an artistic statement. But Susino created this music while his life-experience in the crucible was a present-tense matter. Even more, he did the whole album entirely on his own, in a studio, using both physical and virtual instruments, handling both the production and the mix. It is no wonder that a sustained searing immediacy simmers through each of the seven compositions. Yet, Susino remarks, “I don’t think of the album as sad. More as a reflection. After all, isn’t life made more beautiful by the fact that we know it can change in any moment? That it is so truthful, and so unpredictable?”
Indeed, in the first track, “The Nature of Loss,” the distressed realization of acute personal loss, expressed by the strings, is balanced by the subtle constant textural shifting of acoustic and electronic elements. This does not blunt the edge of deep sorrow in the music. Rather, it adds dimension to the whole experience—and it happens throughout the album, offering the listener an additional avenue of engagement with Susino’s music. He remarks that “subtle shifts do so much. A change in timbre, a harmonic or melodic lean…all of it quietly alters the nature of the experience, even if the listener can’t quite name why.”
“3 Colour Fields” unfolds in three distinct parts. Susino explains, “The track represents the moment my friend was dying in my arms. The first section is the realisation, the full gravity of what is happening landing on you. The manic middle is me trying to fix the unfixable, that desperate, irrational energy of refusing to accept what is already true. And the last section is the weight of acceptance settling in. There is nothing left to do. It is done.”
In “Anima” a blend of unearthly and otherworldly stringed instrument textures is sonically sculpted with great concision into a fragile composition of suspense and enchantment, which ends with a moment of birdsong. Susino reflects, “Grief and memory are strange companions… That distance, that closeness, even contradiction… if any single track on the album holds all of that at once, it is this one.”
“Daylight Collapsing” opens dramatically with a disturbing piano cluster, hanging in vault-like silence. This is one of those rare compositions that expresses the deep candor of the composer. It evokes stress at ethereal levels as the strings convey the flowing contours of unchecked sorrow. It is exceptionally moving.
Running just a little over a minute and a half, “Ever Away from Seeing More Than Life” encapsulates the interior contradictions of the human mind under the immense pressure of personal loss. All the music is provided by two pianos, with music going in different directions. Susino reflects that the pianos “share the same space, the same time. One moves with a certain tenderness and brightness, the other reaches for these unresolved harmonies. Because the gentle and the devastating were never really separate to begin with. And in this track, nothing is resolved because nothing needed to be.”
“In Quiet It Remains” provides a truly inspired integration of acoustic and electronic elements. It is like a third musical language—a hybrid product of the state of deep personal crisis that produced the entire album. It enacts the dignity and love implicit in profound loss. About that integration, Susino says, “Honestly, I have never really seen instruments or genres as fixed categories. That probably comes from my training, classical and electronic, but also simply from the life I have lived. I have been fortunate enough to live in six different countries, hear an enormous range of music, and be shaped by all of it.”
The final track, “Projections of Reality,” is imbued with rapidly shifting textures; all of them contribute to a mysterious quiet beauty. Its closing moments offer a shimmer of acceptance, a quick moment of peace. Susino points out, “There is a Japanese concept, Kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery with gold. The breakage is not hidden, it is honoured…That is what this whole album, and especially this track, is to me. Something has changed, irrevocably. But it is not lost. It is just different now. And in that difference, there is still beauty, perhaps a quieter, more honest kind than before.”
I asked Susino about the poetic composition titles. He explained, “Titles matter enormously to me. They are the first piece of the work anyone sees before a single note plays. And I feel the title has already begun shaping the work. I have always been drawn to artists who understand that… So for me, the titles on this project are as telling of the emotional character of the work as the music itself. ‘Daylight Collapsing’ is a good example. It doesn’t describe what happens in the track but rather it describes a feeling.”
Of course, I give this album my wholehearted recommendation. Throughout, Susino employs all of his musical gifts with the additional benefit of a wise perspective which places an underlying focus on the grace and agony of the human soul at the critical moments of loss—yet still expresses the timeless impulse to restore, and ultimately celebrate, the connections of love and truth in our lives.
Though Inanimate Subjects will not be released until July 17, excerpts from each of its seven tracks can be found here at the links below to composer Susino’s personal website and the album preview. Incidentally, the visual composition of Susino’s entire website is quite arresting.
Important dates:
June 12—The first single, “The Nature of Loss,” is released. The album, Inanimate Subjects, is available to pre-order on all major platforms—with previews.
June 26—The second single, “Daylight Collapsing,” is released.
July 17—The album Inanimate Subjects is released.
Marco Susino’s Inanimate Subjects Album Preview
Inanimate Subjects album cover credit: Levi Meir Clancy
Dan Ursini and his wife Valerie live in Oak Park, Illinois. Over the years he has done many kinds of writing. Ursini served as the first resident playwright for the Steppenwolf Theatre of Chicago (1978-1983); he worked for ten years as a Contributing Editor for Puerto Del Sol magazine; he wrote performance art pieces presented at such Chicago venues as Club Lower Links and Club Dreamerz. Ursini wrote radio theatre presented on NPR in the early 1990s. Throughout all this, he has worked full-time at the Law Library at DePaul University where for a decade he also wrote articles for Dialogue, the DePaul law school’s alumni publication. A particular highlight was his role as a researcher for a documentary, Race to Execution, about the connection between race and capital punishment in the U.S.A. In 2007 it was broadcast on the PBS series, Independent Lens. Apart from all this, Ursini was active for some years as a bass guitarist in various Chicago blues/gospel/funk/lounge configurations. Currently Ursini is working on his latest novel. Dan can be reached at: danursini@aol.com
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