Music from Italy

Anguish [ang-gwish] noun: excruciating or acute distress, suffering, or pain. Originally released by Octopus, a label devoted to thematic libraries, “Angoscia” is one of the best works by Alessandro Alessandroni: here the composer native of Lazio shows his unique skills as an author and as an arranger.¨Famous for his work in the movies – often with masters such as Piero Umiliani and Ennio Morricone, with whom he collaborated to create some truly immortal soundtracks (especially those written for…

Symbolism [sim-buh-liz-uh m] noun : the principles and practice of symbolists in art or literature. Psychedelic [sahy-ki-del-ik] adjective : of or noting a mental state characterized by a profound sense of intensified sensory perception, sometimes accompanied by severe perceptual distortion and hallucinations and by extreme feelings of either euphoria or despair.Gerardo Iacoucci attended the Berklee School Of Music in Boston and, later, founded the Scuola Popolare di Musica di Testaccio (in Rome…

For those who don’t know, A Cat in the Brain (Un Gatto Nel Cervello) is horror master Lucio Fulci’s take on the Director in turmoil sub-genre made popular by Frederico Fellini’s 8 1/2. Composed by frequent collaborator Fabio Frizzi (The Beyond), the soundtrack is everything you want out of an Italian horror score: bizarre, haunting and fun. Fabio Frizzi’s work is a huge part of the reason we got into the soundtrack business in the first place. Mondo is proud to release this soundtrack for …

A dream that has become reality: one of the best and among the most sought after soundtracks by Gianni Ferrio finally comes back to life in LP form. The original record has always been one of the rarest of the entire cult RCA SP series, considered an absolute must-have for the Italian groove hunters of the day: Jazz-funk texture with touches of blaxploitation, b-boy breaks, flipped out hammond, flashes of bossa and the vocal stylings of the unmistakable Edda Dell’Orso. The Four Flies issu…

Out of all Franco Micalizzi’s soundtracks, this is the Holy Grail! The criminal domain usually occupied by the master in his famous police thrillers has been left behind. In Laure, also known as Forever Emanuelle, the territory explored is purely exotic/erotic: unadulterated Italian cinematic trip-hop, with the sensual vocals of Baba Yaga, the phenomenal percussion of Tony Esposito, the clavinet and fender rhodes of Enrico Pieranunzi. One of the most controversial films produced in Italy …

A very dark little score by Ennio Morricone – written for an obscure 1969 period film that starred Marlon Brando (and a very disheveled Brando at that!) – filled with cool tunes that mix the Morricone western mode with some haunting elements that almost have a spiritual approach! Many numbers have these moody, airy notes floating through – on organ on some of the best cuts – and even the overall orchestrations tend to hang in the air, but with a lightness that's often different than the …

Revolver is one the finest Ennio Morricone thriller scores, composed in 1973 for Sergio Sollima's great 1973 giallo film. No sweeping themes, no quirky effects, no dissonant sounds -- just simple ideas, executed to perfection. Contains "Un Amico," the beautiful theme heard in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009); and the masterpiece "Revolver," a 13-minute action piece that dazzles with its brilliance. Incredibly tense dramatic action music of the highest caliber. Includes a perf…

A real masterpiece! The continuous search of Italian library music of the golden age for replication has led Cinedelic to deepen in the last year a reality, strangely not from Rome and Milan, but from Florence. It is a little label that has produced some tens of LPs in the 70’s named Ayna. It was established by producer Sir. Bruzzichelli and Maestro Egisto Macchi (Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza – The Group). This incredible double album truly is an astounding experimental mystica…

2015 restock - "Tra scienza e fantascienza", is an album of histrionic Piero Umiliani recorded under the pseudonym Moggi. A Master gifted with a never ending passion for music, innovator by vocation, experimenter in his genetic code now at ease with synths in order to forge sound that could be reductively termed as avantgarde. Timeless atmospheres, alien hypnotic sonorities, modern and charmingly retro, minimal and complex arranged with an impressive taste for the unknown substance the Maes…

“Le pistole non discutono” is a western movie directed in 1964 by Mario Caiano. Ennio Morricone has composed an orchestral score with dramatic passages with an epic main theme reprised through the score and alternated to Cantina tunes for solo guitar and a Mexican Mariachi performed by a female voice.As source, the newly mastered original 1964 mono tapes were used for this reissue. At that time no album or single were planned, so now every Ennio Morricone completist can collect and enjoy …

“Maddalena” is a Jugoslavian-Italian co-production directed in 1971 by Jerzy Kawalerowicz and starring Lisa Gastoni, Frank Wolff, Ivo Garrani, Paolo Gozlino and Lucia Alberti. The score by Ennio Morricone is one of the main protagonists of this motion picture, featuring the hit song “Chi mai” sung in Italian by Lisa Gastoni. Morricone has written a powerful lounge/religious-style soundtrack with psychedelic and erotic elements given by the amazing performance of Edda Dell’Orso and choir I …

Hold your breath. This is the soundtrack to the 1964 spy movie directed by Romano Ferrara (Roy Freemount) and starring Carol Walker, Luciano Marin and Mary Luger. Composed and directed by Piero Umiliani, Intrigo A Los Angeles is one of the best and rarest soundtracks he ever did, with original copies sold for around 600 euro. This de-luxe double lp reissues comes in a beautiful gatefold sleeve that reproduces the original artwork outside and has a reproduction of the original movie poster insi…

La Vergine Di Norimberga is a great horror movie directed by Antonio Margheriti (aka Anthony Dawson) in 1963, starring Rossana Podestà and Georges Riviere. The great soundtrack, composed orchestrated and directed by the late Maestro Riz Ortolani, will give you the intense pathos of the movie through a series of songs that could be only described as “orchestral horror music”. Do not expect the classic Ortolani’s orchestration or “jazzy” tunes here. "This is Ortolani as you’ve never or rarely hear…

A collaboration between Maurizio Bianchi e Saverio Evangelista (Esplendor Geometrico). Originally published only in Japan in 2007 and deleted from years, now it's time for the long awaited re-release, that - with the cd - features the workshop MICRO by Stefano Gentile, inspired by the album.

Considered one of the most notorious films ever released and banned in over 50 countries for many years, Ruggero Deodato’s most brutal film (and surely one of the first ‘found footage’ films) still retains the power to shock to this day, it charts a team of documentary filmmakers as they go deep into the jungle to find and film the indigenous tribes of the area. “One thing that always stuck out like a sore thumb when viewing Cannibal Holocaust was Riz Ortolani’s score, which is beautifull…

Ennio Morricone has produced masterpiece after masterpiece, but none so creatively unsettling as his score to the 1971 Lucio Fulci giallo, "Lizard in Woman'€™s Skin€ (aka Una Lucertola Con La Pelle Di Donna€). Like many of Fulci'€™s movies, €œLizard blurs the line between dreams and reality, with hedonistic nightmares featuring narcotic-fuelled orgies leading to real murder that may or may not have been committed during one of the dreams. Morricone’s music is …

Death Waltz Recording Company is proud to present yet another soundtrack from the video nasty age, guaranteed* to cause you harm and go out and murder and rape others, this time in the name of the lord. Corrupting your mind this time is Alessandro Alessandroni’s score to Giulio Berruti’s nunsploitation classic Killer Nun (Suor Omicidi). Anita Ekberg stars as Sister Gertrude, a member of the sisterhood who descends into shocking depths of homosexuality and drug addiction while shocking her little…

“Gli Intoccabili” (The untouchables) is a slightly unknown movie that belongs to a very crowded group of international productions made between the ’60s and the ’70s. Some became ‘instant classics’, while many others remained unknown for years, only to be rediscovered recently and pronounced a cult movie. Such as this film directed by Giuliano Montaldo in the US and screened for the first time on April 1969. The cast is stellar, with a young Peter ‘Lieutenant Columbo’ Falk, John Cassavete…

Dagored follows its sold-out Record Store Day 2015 editions of this soundtrack with this transparent vinyl edition, presented in a deluxe transparent plastic cover. This great score for Umberto Lenzi's 1974 cult thriller Spasmo, by the maestro Ennio Morricone, creates a disorienting and disturbing effect, with unusual, almost avant-garde-like sounds, instrumentation, and composition. Dagored presents the complete score on vinyl for the first time, available in two Record Store Day editions…

"Il Diavolo nel Cervello" (Devil in the brain) is a film directed in 1971 by Sergio Sollima and screened at the beginning of the following year; it's a psychological thriller in which tension is determined by the characters' psyche more than their actions, and is therefore an atypical product, that was offered to an audience who at the time were mostly into the 'Dario Argento suspence', made of serial killers, ferocious murders and a pinch of erotism.After three movies in the 'spaghetti w…