Of all my musical adventures in 2024, one of the highlights was working with Perdurabo on the release of his debut album, Magnetar, concluding with a live Q&A at the event space at Shoreditch’s Strongroom. It is a great privilege to get to know an album from the inside out, and an even greater privilege to be able to ask its creator open questions about its genesis.

Perdurabo is the solo project of Davide Arneodo, a key member of Italian rock group Marlene Kuntz. Magnetar saw him (mostly) put down his guitar and create a suite of bold electronic tracks filled with complex textures and enormous, infectious melodies. The album saw him collaborating with a number of vocalists, including Miro Shot.

Miro Shot makes an appearance on ‘Grain Of Sand’, a pivotal track included on a new EP of extra tracks recorded during the Magnetar sessions. It is a strong indicator of Arneodo’s sound. For the first three minutes, the track is defined by rising tension. Miro Shot’s half-sung, half-spoken poetry rests on top of a largely uninterrupted drum pattern, upon which Arneodo adds swirling, minimal electronic sounds, loops and drones that create the suggestion of a storm cloud suddenly about to break. When it finally does break, Arneodo floods the track with a huge, elliptical melody that matches a rising anguish in both the vocal and the rhythm.

As ‘Grain Of Sand’ judders to a rapid conclusion, its tense, melodic atmospherics are taken up by ‘The New Element’, wherein a forlorn synth riff is juxtaposed with a forceful, determined drum pattern. There’s a sniff of industrial music to these tracks, poised as they are on the precipice between hope and despair.

The EP concludes with ‘Soak Up My Tears’, whose clipped piano notes and wafting strings act as the gateway to the track’s mournful, dejected emotional core. If you were to isolate those elements from a restless beat and a stabbing bass sequence, Arneodo could well be crafting a modern classical symphony here. That he decided to hitch those plaintive gestures to electronic structures filled with uncertainty is key to what makes his work as Perdurabo so compelling.

A second album is in the works. One can only hope that these pieces both conclude the Magnetar project and indicate where he intends to take this project next.

Magnetar (Unpublished Works) by Perdurabo was released March 7 2025 by Perdurabo World

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2025 Further.