** Black UV printed tape dubbed at Headless Duplicate Tapes in a multi-cassette plastic case containing the Marrow tabletop RPG poster and insert with rules to play. **  Marrow – Excerpt offers a concentrated immersion into the strange, shifting world built by Merchants, the Italian electronic duo of Alberto Ricca aka Bienoise and Davide Amici. Since 2016, the pair have treated the studio less as a neutral workspace than as a speculative cartography lab, using samples and synthesis to sketch the music of non‑existent countries. Their raw matter is “post‑global debris”: orphaned folk records, anonymous online fragments, environmental recordings and digital artefacts that have slipped free of their original context. Out of this rubble they assemble something like fictional ethnography - not pastiche “world music” but soundtracks from places that never quite existed.

After a debut on Yerevan Tapes, their return to Artetetra with Marrow marks a decisive shift. The earlier work moved like an archaeology of a past that never was: sepia‑toned and hauntological, fascinated by lost futures. Marrow abandons that retro aura and heads instead into a thick present, probing what the duo call the “pseudoacoustics” of invented instruments. Armed with analog, digital, virtual and modular synths, Merchants push FM and physical‑modelling techniques to unstable extremes, conjuring timbres that feel half‑remembered and half‑impossible. These fictional instruments are then threaded together with recordings of interlocking percussion, blasts of “Sumerian” horns, delicate guitar arpeggios, field recordings, dusty folk 78s and snippets dredged from the deep, restless trenches of YouTube.

Nothing here arrives as a neat, closed composition. The tracks are the sediment of more than seven years of scattered sessions, built through a kind of epistolary exchange: files sent back and forth, periodically reopened, dismantled, rearranged, reinterpreted. Every new listen becomes an editing session; every return spawns mutations. In Marrow – Excerpt you can hear those layers rubbing against each other: tunings that don’t quite align, rhythms that almost but never fully lock, textures that seem to belong to different technological eras sharing the same air. The music occupies a paradoxical zone, where historical, imaginary and lived timelines are superimposed and endlessly folded back on themselves. Reconstruction and mimesis blur into elliptical para‑musicology, sketching speculative organologies and ritual functions for instruments that never had bodies.

Threaded through this is a narrative logic borrowed from live role‑playing. The duo’s fascination with tabletop RPG systems informs both structure and atmosphere: tracks behave like campaigns with branching paths; sound objects function as items in an unfolding inventory; chance procedures and rule‑bending become compositional tools. Marrow treats the roll of dice as a mercurial, amoral guide, an engine for decisions that can’t be fully rationalised. The excerpt foregrounds that sensibility: scenes that open onto dead ends, motifs that act as portals, sudden cuts that feel like a failed skill check or an unexpected encounter.

If the first Merchants album felt like a black‑and‑white map, Marrow explodes into full technicolor. The fragment captured in Marrow – Excerpt glimpses an audiovisual terrain where caves and portals are synonyms, deserts behave like enclosed rooms, labyrinths and pathways merge in gentle, continuous misdirection. To extend this beyond pure audio, the full release ships with an open board game set in Marrow’s world, conceived with Artetetra and illustrator Riccardo Redeghieri: each track is tied to a specific interaction on the board, and each move re‑routes how the album can be heard. Even in isolation, though, the excerpt carries that game logic within it, offering not a single path but a cluster of possible itineraries.

Composed, recorded and mixed by Merchants and mastered by Nick Foglia, Marrow – Excerptoperates as both teaser and self‑contained zone: a slice of a larger campaign where the only stable rule is that rules are there to be twisted, and where new, impossible musics are born from the friction between digital underground imagination and the old, persistent human need for myth.