Francesco De Masi, Gianni Ferrio, Piero Umiliani, Various

Long coveted by diggers, samplers, and beat makers, library music and film soundtracks have, over the decades, revealed themselves to be one of the great treasure troves of 20th century music. A wonderful, often overlooked world of sound - vast in its breath and endlessly adventurous and unpredictable in the realizations of its creative ambition - there are few veins more remarkable and thrilling than those efforts produced within Italy during the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. We are thrilled to highlight a mind-melting body of singular works from this remarkable realm, emerging via the legendary imprint Cinevox.

Tidbeats is a sprawling 4 LP Box of recordings by some of Italy’s most notable names in library music and soundtracks, featuring 161 original unreleased tracks from the likes of Stelvio Cipriani, Francesco De Masi, Piero Umiliani, Gianni Ferrio, Giorgio Gaslini, Riz Ortolani, Armando Trovajoli, Piero Piccioni and many others. We can’t express how wonderful and essential it is. Tidbeats is the result of a towering, important work by musicologist and archivist, Alessio Santoni, who discovered and restored each track brewing them into a single linear score. 

A surprising mosaic composed of 161 never-heard-before takes, for a total of two hours of listening, it rises as its own conceptual body in the present, while taking the ear back in the shadowy activities occurring during the golden era of the Italian recording industry, encountering many of the country’s most notable and ambitious composers creating works for film, using the platform as a vehicle for some of the most interesting and ambitious works of their era.

Wildly unpredictable, across the eight sides of Tidbeats we hear funky lines and grooves laced together to create a wild patchwork flirting between pure kitsch and the wilder sides of creative and compositional ambition, opening the window even wider with occasional fragments of the recording sessions and unexpected cameos in the form of the authors' hands-free voice, giving instructions to the musicians. A rigorous philological work and skilful effort of rhythmic and tonal stitching, themes, variations, breaks and interludes, emerge as precious fragments of a collective dream, conceptually recomposed in the now.

Featuring many of the greatest voices of Italian library music and film soundtracks, Tidbeats is issued in two versions/formats: a deluxe box set made of a lush transparent plastic slipcase containing four 180gr. black vinyl LPs - each with an Obi and a 30x30cm inner sheet - and a double CD set housed in a tri-fold digipack with booklet. Wild and singular, there isn’t anything quite like it out there. Essential for any fan of library music, soundtracks, and music at large.