Marco DaCosta

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Marco DaCosta Storytelling & Songwriting | Author and Lyricist with 200+ songs on Spotify and Apple Music 🇺🇸🇧🇷🇮🇹🇬🇧🇦🇷

Community Activist, Member of CB1 - Bronx ( Community Board) New York City, NY

09/06/2026

«The Name Beneath My Skin», de Marco DaCosta para INEXACTA, es una canción inspirada en el universo literario de «The Death of Vivek Oji», de Akwaeke Emezi. La letra convierte el nombre en una afirmación íntima: el derecho a existir más allá de las expectativas familiares, los mandatos sociales y las miradas que confunden amor con posesión. Su voz evoca la ropa que nunca encajó, los espejos que guardaron una verdad y las personas junto a las cuales fue posible respirar sin miedo. No pide permiso ni perdón por su cuerpo. Pide ser recordada tal como fue. En diálogo con el libro, la canción plantea una pregunta que atraviesa cada verso: ¿podemos decir que amamos a alguien si rechazamos su identidad? Una obra sobre el duelo, la libertad y ese nombre que permanece bajo la piel cuando el mundo insiste en llamarnos de otra manera.

09/05/2026

“The Name Beneath My Skin” is an original song by Marco DaCosta for INEXACTA, inspired by Akwaeke Emezi’s novel “The Death of Vivek Oji.” Set in southeastern Nigeria, the book unfolds through grief, intimate relationships and memories, revealing a life that family and friends understood in profoundly different ways. Emezi explores gender, belonging and the distance between loving someone and allowing them to be fully themselves. About the novel. The song approaches this literary universe through an imagined first person voice, asking to be remembered beyond the expectations imposed by others. Its refrain, “Call me by the name beneath my skin,” becomes a plea for recognition, while “I was not lost, I was learning how to live” places discovery and possibility at the center of the story. Conceived as an intimate alternative Afro soul ballad, its musical direction brings together delicate highlife guitar, udu percussion, cello and cinematic strings, balancing vulnerability with quiet defiance. This is an independent musical interpretation, not a literal retelling of the novel. Through it, DaCosta continues INEXACTA’s dialogue between literature and sound, honoring the friendships that make authenticity possible and the courage required to become visible. More than a song about loss, it is a declaration that no one should have to disappear to make others comfortable.

09/04/2026

QAF: The Verse No One Finishes imagines an impossible encounter between Rio de Janeiro and the Arab world. Inspired by the literary universe of Brazilian writer Alberto M***a, the song transforms mystery, longing, and the search for an unfinished word into a dramatic composition shaped by orchestra, oud, qanun, ney, and Arabic percussion.

The music video takes that idea even further. Set in an imagined 1960s Rio, it creates an Arab-Carioca neighborhood across Guanabara Bay, as though the Sahara had always been part of the city’s geography. Traditional Rio bars coexist with bazaars, wooden boats become floating shops, and tropical fruit shares the marketplace with spices, carpets, ceramics, and Moroccan lanterns. Brazilian and Arab musicians inhabit the same extraordinary world.

Gradually, the waters of Guanabara Bay begin to recede. The floating market settles onto the sand, stranded boats become shops, caravans cross what was once the bay, and Rio slowly transforms into a desert landscape. By the end, the Sahara stretches across the horizon, with Sugarloaf Mountain rising from the dunes and a vast turquoise oasis at its feet.

More than placing two cultures side by side, QAF invents a geography that never existed, but perhaps can exist through music: a Rio that is Arab, African, Brazilian, and Mediterranean all at once, where Guanabara Bay meets the Sahara and borders no longer need to remain exactly where history placed them.

09/03/2026

“ALEPH” is an original INEXACTA song inspired by the literary universe of Jorge Luis Borges and his iconic short story “The Aleph.”
In Borges’ vision, the Aleph is a single point in space where the entire universe can be seen simultaneously: every place, every face, every memory, every moment. The song transforms that extraordinary idea into a musical journey through memory, love, time and infinity.
Sung in French with a recurring Spanish chorus, “ALEPH” blends cinematic trip-hop, dark Argentine tango, bandoneon, electronic textures and a nocturnal atmosphere.
The music video reimagines Borges’ universe as a surreal theatrical circus filled with magicians, mirrors, fortune tellers, elegant clowns, acrobats and impossible reflections. As the stage turns and realities multiply, the entire spectacle gradually becomes its own Aleph: a world containing every other world.

“Todo está aquí.”

Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Aleph”

Music & Visual Concept: Marco DaCosta

INEXACTA
Stories Turned Into Songs.

09/03/2026

NEDJMA is an original song by INEXACTA inspired by the literary universe of Algerian writer Kateb Yacine and his landmark 1956 novel “Nedjma.”
Sung in French with an Algerian Arabic refrain, the song transforms Nedjma into more than a love story. She becomes woman, star, memory and homeland, reflecting the novel’s powerful exploration of desire, identity, freedom and colonial Algeria.
Musically, NEDJMA blends a slow romantic acoustic sound with North African textures, including mandole, oud, nylon-string guitar and subtle Algerian percussion. The accompanying film reimagines Constantine through a chic 1960s visual language, where architecture, fashion, music and landscape become part of the story.

Inspired by Kateb Yacine’s “Nedjma”

Music & Visual Concept: Marco DaCosta
INEXACTA

Stories Change When They Travel.

09/02/2026

SALT AND RAIN is a musical and visual journey inspired by the Afar people of the Horn of Africa and the extraordinary landscapes connecting Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti.

Set among salt plains, volcanic earth and approaching rain, the song blends contemporary sounds with inspiration from Afar vocal and rhythmic traditions, incorporating Afaraf words such as “asbo” (salt) and “rob” (rain).

A contemporary tribute to resilience, cultural identity and the profound relationship between people and the land they call home.

Music & Visual Concept: Marco DaCosta
INEXACTA | Stories Change When They Travel

Eritrea Djibouti AfricanMusic WorldMusic MusicShorts

09/02/2026

CUCA reimagines one of Brazil’s most iconic folklore figures as a mysterious enchantress of the Amazon. Set between the vibrant streets, nightlife, rivers and tropical landscape of Belém do Pará, the story follows a fisherwoman by day who becomes an irresistible supernatural presence after dark, captivating men with a whisper and a flash of crimson in her eyes. A contemporary journey through Brazilian folklore, desire and mystery, where the ancient legend of Cuca finds a new life in the heart of the Amazon.

Music & Visual Concept: Marco DaCosta
INEXACTA | Stories Turned Into Songs

09/01/2026

“The Eyes Remember” emerges from the visual and dramatic universe of Kathakali, the extraordinary dance-theatre tradition of Kerala in southern India. The music transforms the language of the eyes, hands, colors and percussion into a contemporary experience, blending rhythms inspired by Kerala with electronic and cinematic elements. In the music video, the ritual begins among tropical forests and ancient stone structures in India before gradually crossing the boundaries of reality and revealing a monumental Broadway stage. India and theatre begin to coexist, as if memory, tradition and performance belonged to the same space. “The Eyes Remember” is ultimately about what remains when words disappear: the body may forget, time may transform everything, but the eyes still remember.

09/01/2026

Inspired by Abel Posse’s “Los perros del paraíso,” NIET VAN JOU transforms the mythology of 1492 into a theatrical collision between history, literature and music. Argentine tango meets Dutch hip-hop in a cinematic opera-rap where the familiar story of “discovery” is turned around: the ships arrived in a world that already had names, languages, cultures and memories.

The Spanish verses tell the story. The Dutch chorus delivers the answer:

“Het paradijs was niet van jou.”

Paradise was not yours.

Inspired by Abel Posse’s
“Los perros del paraíso”

Music & Visual Concept
Marco DaCosta

INEXACTA

DutchHipHop OperaRap

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New York, NY
10455

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+19296101462

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