MARCULEDU
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INTERVIEW | 01/07/2025Embedded Files
Marcu Autiero is a non-binary producer, composer, and musician. They live in Naples and are 24 years old. Under the name marculedu, they create music that moves between pop, experimental electronics, and live performance ranging from bedroom-made beats to sensors activated by acrylic nails. But beyond genres, their practice is driven by something more urgent: the desire to inhabit a space of their own, to shape an identity that doesn’t always fit within available categories.
A graduate in Electronic Music from the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory, their relationship with music began almost by accident—a guitar offered by their father, a random store in Caserta and has continued ever since. In this interview, they speak about how sound can become a way to process grief, explore dysphoria, or imagine possible futures. Also, what it means to make art from a queer body in a world that so often denies its existence.
Their work with the Mutants Mixtape collective, their admiration for artists like SOPHIE, Amy Winehouse, and Laetitia Sonami, and their way of understanding technology as an extension of the body make their music a space that is open, intimate, and political. It’s not about representing an identity, but about making it vibrate.
1. Your music moves between pop, experimental sound design, and highly connected performances. How would you describe what drives your practice?
As far as my relationship with creativity goes, I tend to welcome any work that arises from a time-suspended, dissociative state. You know that sensation when six hours go by and you barely notice, even though you’ve been working intensely the entire time? That’s when I know the work has come from a place of intuition, necessity, and impetus. My practice is about attracting and embracing those moments, because I know that when they happen, body, mind and energy are fully aligned, and everything is allowed to flow: chaos, discipline, intimacy, eroticism, pain, relief, comfort, rage, dysphoria, euphoria, shame, vanity. No picking, no filters, just rippling, and the acts that follow.
2. How do you conceive the political or identity dimension of your music? Your work seems to overflow traditional aesthetic categories, but also identity categories. Do you believe that sound can be a space to reconfigure the political beyond discourse? What possibilities does sonic experimentation open up for thinking about other forms of body, desire, or community?
When I think about it, it’s clear that the drive behind my musical creation has always been about making something worthwhile, meaningful in some way. I feel ashamed, as the world collapses beneath our feet. I keep questioning whether I’m truly doing anything that matters, considering that music is the only thing I know how to do. I believe music and activism can mutually fulfill each other, that’s where the abstract, ephemeral particles of sonic matter can find purpose. I try to support artists directly, share their work, take part in non-profit compilations that raise funds, join collectives, donate, find communities, and stay aware. Music can be stale if you let it, it’s all a matter of intention. It’s underestimated how much engagement with music can carry the potential for active change. Sometimes I don’t connect with an album on first listen, only to fall in love with it two years later. That’s because it has slowly proliferated through the body, and I’ve been moulting over time. I love it because my skin has shed. That’s when you know the work was permeated with intention. And I want to manifest, through music, both the world I long for and the version of myself I strive to become.
artwork by Mario González (@marandozaton)
3. José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia proposes that art is “the spark of the world to come,” where “utopia is not simply a desire for something better; it is a concrete anticipation of desire, a gesture toward a future time that is already in the now,” a way to glimpse and make present a queer horizon yet to come.
In this sense, your work seems not only to inquire into identity and desire but also to sketch possible ways of seeing the body, working with art, and engaging certain emotionalities. How do you understand your music from a utopian or political imagination dimension? What futures open up or are touched upon in your artistic practice, and what role do art and technology play in this vision of a world still to be built?
I’m drawn to forms of utopia that move beyond their signified, utopias that are transformative, tangible, actuable. Domina, the title track of my debut album, was essentially a coming out, to myself. I remember the heat of summer 2021, writing lyrics over a beat I had made. The words flowed out so spontaneously. When it was done, I found myself staring at my phone, paralyzed, dissociated, but also liberated. Even though I didn’t yet have the courage to say explicitly “You are a woman,” I knew a sleeper force deep inside me had awakened. Music sped up emotional and psychological processes that might otherwise have taken years. Domina allowed me to explore my femininity, my gender and sexual identity, through songwriting, beatmaking, and sound design. Ableton was like a therapist. It still is. For my persona, there’s a before Domina and an after. The hardest part has been living with the short circuit between the two. I felt euphoric listening to my own tracks, so feminine in the beats and so vulnerable in the lyrics. But in real life, I was struggling. I had no confidence when the monitors were off. I couldn’t recognize myself in the beard, the clothes, the hair. When silence fell and I was far from the comfort my music provided, the body hair felt thicker, my hands looked bigger, my voice deeper, my genitals a concern. Everything I had always sensed, without knowing what it was, came rushing in all at once. Creating music with a computer or performing with wearable sensors is my way of coping with that short circuit, not escaping it, but attempting to neutralize it. And every time I manage to wire the pins correctly, that is my true utopia made real.
4. To what extent do you feel your practice is situated within a queer genealogy in experimental music?
This is something I believe listeners should decide. I’m not doing things for queerness, but I think queerness is doing things through me. I try to push out whatever emerges from my unconscious, desires, traumas and pulsations. When I create, I’m led by a libidinal force, a craving to dig deeper, a yearning to bloom. I often feel disillusioned when a work is loudly branded in every tiny aspect of it, but then you experience it and it gives nothing to resonate with, it doesn't do much, both emotionally and viscerally. For me, sensing queerness in a work of art goes far beyond ticking boxes or stating credentials. Resonance isn’t guaranteed by representation alone. It is a spectrum made of infinitesimal diffractions. You might find just one, or billions of points on it, and let the light pass through. I love those moments after a performance when my sisters come to me saying they felt something profound and transformative in the way they experienced my music. It always happens paradoxically, precisely when I’m worried that my lyrics are too cryptic and my sounds are speaking just for me. If my work does anything, I don’t want it to be blinding, cheeky or over-explicit. I hope it offers my community a space to find their own enlightening spots in that spectrum, to reflect upon them, and to shine through its ever-evolving blaze.
5. To what extent do you feel your practice is inscribed in a queer genealogy within experimental music? What references, affections, or cultural memories resonate in your work, and how do you engage with them sonically and performatively?
I really try to stay connected to what I’d call “queer epiphanies,” those moments when I first felt different, misaligned, misshaped. I remember being maybe around six, wearing a white t-shirt upside down using the collar as a wig cap, putting on a tiny bit of lipstick, and walking into the living room where my parents were watching TV. I'd shout, “Hello, I’m Jessica now.” They were so amused, watching me perform the little baby girl I somehow felt I was. At around ten, I'd create romantic scenarios in my older sister's room with candles and dim lights, then leave a post-it on her desk saying "Please, can I borrow one of your skinny jeans?" while I hid under her bed, waiting for her reaction, hoping for a yes. My music comes from an urge to time-shift my brain chemistry, to synchronize my neural clock with the one held by my inner child, with the aim of creating something from a space unbounded by trauma, fear, rejection, filters, or conscious thought, but infused with courage, fierceness, spontaneity, and faith. My work reflects queerness as it pulses with the aftershocks of having once felt it without knowing what it was. There's this common practice in music production: comparing the track you're working on with a released reference you’re trying to match. I try to stay away from that. Of course, there are artists who inspire me deeply, that's inevitable, but when I want to reference the sound of a snare drum or the filtering of a vocal track, I'm not listening to it actively in order to emulate it. Instead, I try to awaken, from silence, the somatic traces that music left sedimented in my body, the micro-movements of my hair cells as I engaged with that particular song, the emotional response echoing from the bassline I’m recalling. It's not about recreating the reference, but its resonance.
6. How does your artistic and sonic practice engage with dystopian imaginaries, and how do you use those scenarios to reflect on contemporary reality?
My artistic practices are far from dystopian, mainly because I use music to dissuade myself from the reality I’m expected to live in, both socially and individually. I don’t see dystopia as a futuristic projection: it already exists, here and now, in the shitty world we inhabit. We can sense it, as long as we remain conscious. There’s no comfort in imagining dystopia anymore, because it has already merged with our everyday life. If I’m singing about struggle, if my music sounds distorted, I’m not projecting, I’m reporting my current take on reality. And if the acrylic nails attached to my sensors keep getting longer and longer, it's because I'm striving for confidence, probably because I don't have it. I want my work to be perceived as a threat to how things are, especially for myself. That’s why I’m more drawn to utopia as an enemy to the dystopia I already endure.
artwork by Mario González (@marandozaton)
7. You have worked within the Mutants Mixtape collective, alongside artists like Arca. How did that collaborative experience influence your development as an artist and your creative vision?
So many cherished memories! My very first release as marculedu was “DDVerso,” included in Mutants Mixtape VOL. 2: Riot. It was 2020, we were all locked inside our homes, and the only thing we could do as creatives was come together and raise funds using the only tool we had: making art. It was a blessing that the mixtapes continued over the years, allowing us to gather our creative forces in support of social and political causes, uplifting BIPOC communities, Palestinian people, queer and trans lives. I’m still in touch with many independent artists across the globe, some of whom began their journeys at the same time as I did. That experience also dissolved the sense of hierarchy and subjection I once felt toward established artists. Sharing a horizontal, non-hierarchical musical space with people I had admired for years dismantled the idea of verticality in the arts for me. It made everything feel more possible, more mutual, more real.
8. What are the conceptual, musical, or philosophical influences that have shaped your work, and how do these references dialogue with your exploration of the body, identity, and sonic experimentation?
Listening to a vast amount of acousmatic music has inherently reconfigured the way I dismantle and digest a production or a mix. The works I encountered during my academic years, especially those by avant-garde pioneers such as Pierre Schaeffer, Wendy Carlos, John Cage, and Delia Derbyshire, still push me to channel that sense of first-encounter awe into everything I listen to and create. I’ve had four key cornerstones at very different moments in my life: Amy Winehouse for songwriting, Tom Misch for beatmaking, SOPHIE for sound design, and Laetitia Sonami for wearable instruments. I became deeply obsessed with their work. What all these references have in common is a relentless pursuit of identity through artistic expression, an ongoing hunt for unprecedented singularities. Music remains the primary sensorial medium that truly shapes my life, and what moves me most is tracing the paths that led artists far enough to glimpse and embody the contours of their unique forms.
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