Various

Featuring: Amedeo Tommasi, Jarrell

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. Limited to 500 copies, with renewed artwork by painter Stefania Casagrande and liner notes by music journalist Marco Ferretti.

Tommasi is one of the more fascinating figures in Italian music of the period. A jazz pianist who had played alongside Chet Baker before migrating toward film and library work - eventually collaborating with Ennio Morricone on electronic music and soundscapes for dozens of films - he appears here under two of his working pseudonyms, Atmo and Jarrell. His collaborators are equally masked: Leandro Piccioni under his own name, and Umberto Santucci operating as Montedoro. The pseudonyms were standard practice in library work, protecting composers who held exclusive contracts while allowing them to work across multiple labels simultaneously. Behind them, though, is a coherent sensibility: soft, loungy atmospheres that open periodically into something deeper and more hypnotic, delicate marine themes giving way to droning, abyssal passages before surfacing again.

Elegant, weightless, and genuinely impossible to find in its original form. One of the quieter discoveries in Italian library music - and one of the most persuasive.