** 2 LP Set + Dedicated Tote Bag Special Bundle Price ** In the summer of 1976, a peculiar album appeared in Italian record shops bearing no artist name - only the cryptic moniker Elektriktus. The music posed a question that wouldn't be answered for decades: who had created this hybrid of jazz sensibility and kosmische synthesis? The answer was hiding in plain sight. Andrea Centazzo - recognized figure in European free improvisation who had shared stages with Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, and Derek Bailey - had been leading a double life between touring with Giorgio Gaslini's quartet, conducting experiments with Minimoog, Davolisint, and the GEM Rodeo 49 synthesizer.
PDU Records - owned by pop icon Mina and Italy's primary distributor for German avant-garde labels including Brain, Kosmische Musik, and Pilz, making PDU the Italian gateway to Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, Cosmic Jokers, and the broader kosmische scene, often releasing these albums in prestigious Quadraphonic editions - recognized the value of what Centazzo had created but worried his jazz identity would confuse the cosmic electronics market. The solution: create Elektriktus as pseudonym, fusing "electronic" with "Ictus."
VOL. 1 - The Original 1976 Album Where German kosmische musik tended toward the infinite and abstract, Centazzo's electronic music retained tactile, physical quality. Franco Feruglio's upright bass walks and breathes, remembering northern Italian folk traditions. These eight synth-fueled tracks sound close to what kraut/cosmische heads were doing - think Conrad Schnitzler, Deuter, Cosmic Jokers, Richard Pinhas' Heldon - yet Elektriktus represents the most adventurous experimental sounds under kosmische influence to emerge from Italy, transforming German models through Mediterranean sensibility and freeform jazz ethos.
VOL. 2 - The Discovered Archive Fifty years after the original sessions, the Elektriktus story reveals an unexpected second chapter. In 2019, Centazzo discovered a box of unlabeled tape reels in his mother's attic. Transferred by master engineer Sergio Tomasini during COVID-19 lockdowns, the resurrected music captured Andrea's forgotten performances with Lacy, Parker, Kent Carter, and Alvin Curran, plus still-unpublished fragments from the 1973-76 "Elektriktus" sessions. By adding contemporary digital electronics to the original analog recordings, Centazzo creates temporal palimpsest - the composer at seventy-something in dialogue with his younger self across fifty years.
The reborn Ictus label - Centazzo's own imprint - presents both volumes as complementary documents: Vol. 1 preserving the original artifact in its analog integrity, Vol. 2 revealing its latent possibilities through temporal superimposition. Together, they map territory that standard histories of electronic music have largely overlooked - the Italian synthesis of kosmische consciousness and Mediterranean sensibility, the persistence of jazz's improvisational ethos within supposedly "cosmic" structures.
The phantom that PDU Records once denied a proper name finally speaks, twice, across fifty years.
