“Face to Face”: the new album by Ivano Icardi and Davide Liberti
18 Sep 2026
Face to Face, the new album by Ivano Icardi and Davide Liberti, is now available on all major digital platforms, released by Machiavelli Music under the Machiavelli Music Artist Series label.
The project grew out of the meeting between Ivano Icardi’s guitar and Davide Liberti’s double bass. Two instruments and two musical identities engaging directly with one another, creating a dialogue shaped by composition, improvisation, rhythm and silence.
For Ivano Icardi, the album stems first and foremost from a search for authenticity and from the desire to bring music back to something immediate and alive:
“This project was born out of a need for authenticity. I felt that, for music to truly become mine again, it had to free itself from everything that is planned, constructed and anticipated. I needed to rediscover the pure gesture: the sound that emerges while you are searching for it, the note that arrives because you are listening to it, not because you imagined it beforehand.”
A dialogue between guitar and double bass
Face to Face moves through ambient atmospheres, blues influences, lyrical passages and more dynamic, instinctive moments. Its cinematic dimension is one of the album’s recurring elements: the melodies unfold like images, while the two instruments alternate, follow one another and support each other.
The album opens with Sunrays, a track built around a luminous theme and a complex polyphonic improvisation before returning to the clarity of the main melody. Its reverse ending immediately introduces the suspended, cinematic aesthetic of the project.
Blue Essence, on the other hand, originated from a spontaneous improvisation recorded during the first day of the sessions. A distant blues influence emerges through the rhythmic accents of the double bass and the essential lines of the guitar.
Throughout the album, the freedom of improvisation coexists with pieces that were already part of the musicians’ individual repertoires and that, in this new formation, have taken on a more intimate and essential dimension:
“Some tracks grew out of pure improvisation, spontaneous gestures that turned into music without being consciously sought. Others come from our personal repertoire, pieces we have carried with us for a long time and that have found a new form here, more intimate and more essential.”
Davide Liberti
Intimacy, movement and contemplation
Among the album’s most contemplative moments is Path of Life, guided by a theme that gradually opens up through the bowed sound of the double bass, as well as You Never Speak, a composition by Davide Liberti in which the guitar takes on a deep, lyrical voice.
The album’s more dynamic and instinctive side emerges in Kid Savage, built around a rapid, restless movement, and in Sankarà, an insistent, rhythmic piece composed by Liberti, driven by fast repeated notes and sudden changes of direction.
The album also includes Odessa, a slow and poignant composition dedicated to the tragedy that struck the city, and a reinterpretation of Time After Time, transformed by the duo into an intimate, warm and essential version.
Within the Machiavelli Music Artist Series, Face to Face stands out as a production with a strong artistic identity, built around the meeting of two musicians and their search for a personal musical language.
“This album was not planned: it happened. It is the testimony of two instruments that listen to each other, trust each other, influence one another and find a shared direction.”
Davide Liberti
“This is an album that was not born from the desire to impress, but from the need to be authentic. Two instruments meeting, listening to each other, influencing one another and discovering together which direction to take.”
Ivano Icardi
Recorded between March and April 2026 at Skyline Studio in Turin, Face to Face was produced, recorded, mixed and mastered by Ivano Icardi.
Credits
Ivano Icardi – guitar
Davide Liberti – double bass
© & ℗ 2026 Machiavelli Music
Listen to Face to Face on all major digital platforms:
On the Machiavelli Music website:
