Marco Susino steps into Inanimate Subjects, released on July 17, 2026 via Visée, with a record built around loss as an active compositional force: unstable, present, and unresolved.
From the album, The Nature of Loss distills that tension into one of its most direct emotional moments.
Piano, strings, electronics, processed textures, and held silence move through the album as structural elements rather than decoration, shaping grief into something intimate, spatial, and exact.
In this FM PRO 10Q, Susino breaks down the emotional and technical architecture behind the project, from writing inside grief in real time to using restraint, sequencing, acoustic treatment, and electronic detail as part of the score’s internal logic.
Across Inanimate Subjects, grand piano, strings, Moog synths, sampled rhythm, and analogue treatments merge classical depth with electronic freedom.
For FM PRO TECH, the signal is direct: no melodrama, no over-scoring. Just memory, pressure, and sound doing the work language cannot.
Classical taught me depth, and electronic taught me freedom. It opened up so much possibility: I started doing things I’d never thought of, and stopped thinking in terms of which tradition a sound or technique belonged to, thinking only about what felt interesting.
Q1. Inanimate Subjects is rooted in sudden loss, but stays focused on presence. What made you write from inside the moment rather than looking back?
I wanted to stay true to the feeling, the rawness of it, which often wasn’t easy. Writing from inside the moment was the only way to keep it honest. Memory rearranges things; given time, I might have softened or reshaped what happened without realising. Working from within meant the music holds what was actually there, not a version I’d later made easier to bear.
Q2. The title suggests absence and presence at once. What did that contradiction open up for you compositionally?
How much this soul meant to me. That even after they were gone, they kept being present, in my mind, in my conversations, as if they’d never left. And that contradiction of being gone but ever so present turned into the actual writing. The music had to hold both the absence and presence. Melodies that or harmonies that hold without ever resolving, and a lot of ambiguity in the writing, like silence and held notes.
Q3. How did you decide when a sound needed to stay acoustic and when it needed electronic treatment?
It’s a matter of intuition for me. I’ve always worked with both, like two different sets of colours. Restricting to one would be limiting, and sometimes you want shades, or chiaroscuro. That’s simply the way I write. I rarely try a sound both ways, acoustic then processed, to see which works best. I think about what I want it to musically achieve, and then work it through the score from there. The decision is made before the sound is, if that makes sense. It’s compositional, not something I audition after the fact.
Q4. The album feels cinematic but restrained. How did you give the music emotional weight without overdramatising it?
To dramatise it too much would have been a misrepresentation of who I am, and of what the work represents. I learned in time that you can say a great deal with very little. In this album, as in other works, I try to reach the most impact through restraint, trusting that what’s held back carries as much weight as what’s played.
Q5. You have worked across classical composition and electronic culture, including material connected to Metronomy, The Prodigy, and Gary Numan. How has that shaped your language?
It defined who I am as a composer. Moving between those worlds taught me the two needn’t be separated but can live in the same musical narrative, and for me, even complement each other. Classical taught me depth, and electronic taught me freedom. It opened up so much possibility: I started doing things I’d never thought of, and stopped thinking in terms of which tradition a sound or technique belonged to, thinking only about what felt interesting.
Q6. FM PRO TECH Q: What tools, treatments, or production choices helped you merge acoustic instrumentation with electronic design on Inanimate Subjects?
Warmth and subtlety mattered most on Inanimate Subjects. The piano is a grand Steinway Model D, though I darkened it significantly with EQ and played with the top closed to get the right colour. On two tracks I use both a sampled 808 and a LinnDrum, and my go-to Moog synths feature throughout, though subtly. I’m also drawn to the Neve analogue character that sits underneath everything.
In fact, the merging came through treatment more than layering. I’d run acoustic instruments through Moogerfooger pedals, and often doubled strings or piano with a much quieter electronic or sampled version, using Orchestral Tools instruments, panning the two slightly off each other. You don’t quite hear two sounds; you hear one that’s wider and harder to place.
Q7. Your work spans screen, dance, installation, and concert settings. How did that influence the album’s use of space and movement?
I can honestly say my work has been shaped as much by collaborating with choreographers, directors, and installations as by my formal education. In those mediums you stop treating music as only sound and instead it becomes shape, size, depth, narrative, space. That changes how you write.
You find yourself reaching for verticality, or distance, or weight, rather than thinking purely in notes. It carries directly into how I mix and place sound, too, building the music as an environment you move through rather than simply listen to. On Inanimate Subjects, that meant thinking about where a sound sits in the room as much as what it plays.
Q8. Ngalki uses excerpts from an Australian Indigenous language with only four speakers left. What responsibility comes with bringing that into contemporary composition?
I was asked by the Yanyuwa community to score this commissioned Requiem honouring their language and people. I worked throughout the whole score with their trusted cultural advisors. That invitation shaped everything. The responsibility was never to treat the language as material or texture, but to listen first and defer to the people whose knowledge this is.
I worked with linguists and advisors to grasp Indigenous ways of understanding entirely new to me, always aware that I was a guest in that knowledge, not an owner of it. With a language carried by only a handful of speakers, the task was to honour and celebrate it, on the community’s terms and wishes, and every movement was scored in that fashion.
Q9. As a Juilliard Continuing Guest Artist, what do you try to pass on about emotional precision in composition?
That it’s fundamental to why we engage with music at all — as composers, dancers, filmmakers, or listeners. Emotion is the reason any of it matters. But it’s also remarkably difficult to grasp, to translate into notes or sounds, and what reads as deeply moving to one person may leave another untouched, or stir something entirely different.
I try to pass on that uncertainty rather than smooth it over, to write toward feeling precisely while accepting you can never fully control where it lands. Working with the choreographers at Juilliard sharpens this constantly: you watch an emotion travel from sound into the body, and you see in real time what survives the translation and what doesn’t. Ultimately it’s my process, the core of how I write, in every work, whatever the medium.
Q10. FM PRO TECH Q: How did you approach sequencing, dynamics, and recurring motifs so Inanimate Subjects felt like one continuous emotional environment?
The order of the tracks is really the dramatic arc, so I spent a long time on what follows what, how one piece hands over to the next. The recurring motifs do most of the connective work, but I rarely repeat them outright.
I like micro-shifts, where a motif comes back fractionally altered: a different harmonisation underneath, a change of playing technique, a slower rate, landing slightly early or late – small enough that you feel the return more than you notice it. Then, every so often, I let a genuinely significant change land, so the familiar suddenly opens somewhere new.
As for dynamics, I kept them deliberately narrow. It felt right for this record, or at least most of it. It comes back to that idea of restraint from earlier: keeping the range tight means the few moments I do open up carry much more weight than they otherwise would.
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