** First-ever release of the complete 1983 album ** Fantasy is the lost chapter of Piero Umiliani’s story finally opening, a full album completed in 1983 and then left in the dark for over forty years. Intended as the fourth title for Telesound - the last in the composer’s long line of library imprints, following Omicron, Liuto Records, SWS, Ciak and Videovoice - it never reached the pressing plant. A sudden illness halted Umiliani’s work and froze the project in the archives of his Sound Work Shop studio. For decades it existed, if at all, as a rumour among collectors: a missing volume from the most exploratory phase of a musician who had already done everything from lounge exotica and jazz to cult film scores and pure electronics.
The rediscovery of two original 1/4‑inch stereo masters changed that. Pulled from storage more than thirty years after they were recorded, these reels revealed an album that captures Umiliani’s late style with startling clarity. Three of its pieces had slipped out in fragmentary form on the Four Flies compilations Studio Umiliani and L’Uomo Elettronico, hinting at a trove of unheard material behind them. Fantasy finally presents the complete work, sequenced exactly as the composer originally intended, in the format for which it was conceived. Released at last on the centenary of Umiliani’s birth, it arrives not as a reconstructed puzzle but as a fully formed object, simply delayed by time.
Sonically, the record occupies a pivotal position in Umiliani’s universe. It fuses the ease and melodic charm of his library and soundtrack writing with the experimental electronic impulses he had been pursuing since the 1970s. Analogue synthesizers sketch gliding lines and arpeggiated constellations; light orchestrations add strings, winds and small ensemble colours; gently propulsive rhythm sections keep everything buoyant without tipping into bombast. The tone is exploratory but never forbidding. Themes hint at scientific imagery, natural processes and speculative futures, yet they are delivered with the same singable directness that once powered his best‑known film cues.
Part of the album’s fascination lies in its balance of polish and playfulness. You can hear Umiliani’s command of studio craft in the way textures are layered - a synth pad hovering above a brushed drum pattern, a wordless choral figure glinting against an electronic bassline - but there is also a childlike delight in sound itself. Short cues slide into slightly longer, more developed tracks; mood pieces suggest documentary sequences about oceans, laboratories or distant planets without ever spelling them out. The record feels like a journey of the imagination more than a commission for a specific image, a rare glimpse of what happens when a veteran library composer writes purely for the pleasure of building worlds.
Heard today, Fantasy reads as an unintended artistic testament: the last major original project Umiliani completed before illness abruptly cut short his activity. That status gives it obvious historical weight, but the music’s value is not merely documentary. It fills a crucial gap in the arc that runs from his early jazz and lounge work through the pioneering electronic albums and on into his late library experiments. You can hear how ideas from different eras of his career intersect here: the harmonic ease of his easy‑listening side, the textural curiosity of his electronic explorations, the concise narrative instincts honed in film and television.
This release also reframes Umiliani’s role in the broader evolution of Italian music. Fantasy shows a composer in his sixties still pushing into new territory, folding emerging synth timbres and production techniques into his toolkit without losing his melodic fingerprint. It underlines how central he was not only to film and library cultures but to the early adoption and normalization of electronic sound in Italian popular and media music. What might once have been dismissed as “functional” cues reveal themselves, in this light, as part of a larger, coherent vision.
By arriving on the exact day of the Maestro’s centenary, Fantasy closes a circle. A record conceived at the tail end of his working life now steps forward as a fresh listening experience, vibrant rather than archival. It is, finally, what it was always meant to be: a self‑contained voyage into Piero Umiliani’s late imagination, where science and nature, circuitry and melody, discipline and play find a rare equilibrium.
