A project by Raffaele Iannello published in Musica !, the insert of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica dedicated to rock and other musical genres. A few months earlier a competition had been launched in which the readers of the magazine were asked to try to design the statuette to be delivered to the winners of the next edition of the PIM, the Premio Italiano della Musica (Italian Music Prize), which was to be held shortly thereafter. In this issue released on February 25, 1999, an article recounted the enthusiasm generated by the competition and described some of the proposals received up to that moment.
Among the thousands received, only 8 were published. The statuette for the PIM designed by Raffaele Iannello, even if in the end it was not the chosen proposal, still impressed the jury of the competition, led by dj Linus of Radio Deejay. Jokingly nicknamed by journalists “marzipan paleo-cat”, in the article reported here it is cited three times.

In the designer’s idea, this object wanted to be the perfect synthesis of the music concept itself. It was in fact the representation of the union of the musical instrument from which the music was generated and of the listener who was enjoying it at that moment.

The logo of the record company “La voce del padrone” (and its British offshoot “His Master’s Voice”) was the starting point. The gramophone and the little dog present there had been fused together giving life to an anthropomorphic object characterized by a marked ironic and provocative vein, which are the designer’s stylistic code.

Everything was then made very “plasticky” to make it as ergonomic as possible, being an object to hold in the hand. To add a reference to contemporaneity (and also to the future, from the point of view of that moment), the animal’s head had the shining face of a cd (Compact Disc), at the time the most widespread musical medium and considered the most advanced from a technical point of view.