Library Selects
Fatevi Vivi La Polizia Non Interverrà
The son of a judge who trained as a lawyer before abandoning the profession for music, Piero Piccioni brought to Italian cinema a compositional intelligence that set him apart from almost every contemporary. His collaborators included Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, and Francesco Rosi - a list that places him closer to the art film than the genre picture. Yet it is in the crime and thriller scores of the 1970s that his work finds some of its most inventive expression,…
Tra Scienza E Fantascienza
Timeless atmospheres, hypnotic sonorities, minimal arrangements. And a composer gifted with a never ending passion for music, experimenter in his genetic code, innovator by vocation, at ease with various instruments in order to forge avant-garde themes. Piero Umiliani was already forward in building completely new sounds in the late Seventies. “Tra Scienza E Fantascienza” finds his alter ego Moggi experimenting with alternative grooves, electronic music, jazz tunes and soundtrack motifs. One of …
Special Sound Series – Vol. 1: Catch in Alice
Considered by many one of the most gifted and outstanding players in the Electone community thanks to his fresh, energetic, rhythmic and sometimes humorous style of playing, from 1975 to 1977 Shigeo Sekitō released a four-LP album set titled Special Sound Series for the iconic Nippon Columbia. On the first chapter of this series, Sekitō revisits, in his own colourful style, compositions such as "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life" by Stevie Wonder, "Oh, My Love" by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, "Andalu…
Sono Stato Un Agente CIA
“Sono Stato Un Agente CIA” (1978), also known as “Covert Action”, is a twilight film directed by Romolo Guerrieri and set in Greece, starring David Janssen, in the role of a former Central Intelligence Agency agent who became a writer of incendiary books on prostitution and drug trafficking, flanked by Maurizio Merli, a colleague in possession of some compromising tapes, sentimentally linked to the romance novel character played by the seductive Corinne Cléry. The two are involved in a murky ga…
Nel Mondo Del Lavoro
Few albums capture Italian library music at its most purposefully conceived as Nel Mondo Del Lavoro. Originally released in 1972 on Sermi - one of the foundational labels of the Italian production music scene, co-founded by Sergio Pagoni and Michelangelo Cunsolo in close orbit with Bruno Nicolai and Ennio Morricone's world - the album was commissioned as the soundtrack to a RAI television documentary series on the petroleum industry, Sapere: Il Petrolio. What Rino De Filippi built from that brie…
News! News! News!
The incomparable Piero Umiliani (under his mysterious Moggi moniker) weighs in with another killer library gem of 1979. “News! News! News!” was originally released in few copies on the small imprint Sound Work Shop, both label and recording studio owned by the cult maestro. Musica Per Immagini gave another chance to its eleven amazing electronic and jazz tracks played by some of the best musicians who took part in the golden age of Italian music libraries. This sought-after album is the way the …
Mare Romantico
Where Il Mare descends - darker, more electronic, built around the alien geometry of deep water - Mare Romantico stays closer to the surface. Originally released in 1974 on the obscure Pretty label in a pressing so small it had effectively vanished by the time anyone thought to look for it, this is the second volume in Sonor Music Editions' aquatic library triptych: seventeen tracks of analogue synthesizer and electronic lounge, recorded for TV sea documentaries in Amedeo Tommasi's own studio. L…
Il Mare - Musica Con Strumenti Elettronici
Ten tracks, one subject. Edmondo Giuliani's Il Mare: Musica Con Strumenti Elettronici was originally conceived in 1972 as the score for an obscure sea documentary, recorded in Amedeo Tommasi's own studio and issued on the near-invisible micro-label Dischi Egede as part of a library series titled "Brani Per Sonorizzazione". The brief couldn't have been simpler - music for the sea - and what emerged from it is one of the more singular electronic records of the Italian library era. Sonor Music Edit…