Lucky restock. Spectrum is not a compilation so much as a séance. Plastic Records has gathered sixteen tracks that collectively summon the nocturnal soul of an era when jazz, pop, and cinematic ambition collided in recording studios from London to Los Angeles, from Havana to Harlem. The title promises film noir themes, but the truth is more expansive: this is the sound of sophisticated menace distilled into three-minute doses, music that belongs equally to smoke-filled jazz clubs and Technicolor widescreen.
The collection opens with Mandingo and His Orchestra's "Blackrite," a track that immediately establishes the album's refusal to stay in one lane. Geoff Love (1917–1991), the British orchestra leader and arranger who created Mandingo as an Afro-funk alter ego, built the project at Abbey Road Studios with producer Norman Newell in the early 1970s-technically beyond the compilation's stated decade, but spiritually essential. Where Love's work under the pseudonym Manuel and the Music of the Mountains dealt in lush, easy-listening orchestration, Mandingo was something else entirely: tribal drums, wah-wah guitars, explosive brass. "Blackrite" arrives like a dispatch from some imaginary blaxploitation thriller, all tension and release.
From there, Spectrum pivots to Lalo Schifrin's iconic Mission: Impossible theme-perhaps the most recognized piece of television music ever composed, its 5/4 time signature still synonymous with covert operations and impossible odds. Schifrin, the Argentine-born composer who studied with Olivier Messiaen in Paris before becoming Dizzy Gillespie's pianist and arranger, represents the high-modernist wing of this collection: conservatory credentials deployed in service of pure visceral impact.
The transatlantic dialogue continues with Armando Sciascia's contributions. The Italian composer and arranger-a key figure in the European easy listening and library music scenes-offers both a reading of Jesus Christ Superstar and the atmospheric "Suoni Di Coreografia," demonstrating the era's fluid boundaries between sacred, secular, and cinematic.
Eartha Kitt's sultry "Love For Sale" reminds us that noir has always been as much about seduction as danger. The song, drawn from Cole Porter's 1930 musical The New Yorkers, found new life in Kitt's 1965 interpretation-her feline delivery transforming familiar material into something genuinely unsettling.
The compilation's heart, however, beats with Latin rhythms. Pucho and The Latin Soul Brothers, the New York ensemble led by timbales player Henry "Pucho" Brown, contribute two tracks from their 1966 Prestige album Tough!: a smoldering "Walk On By" that reimagines Burt Bacharach and Hal David's pop hit as late-night boogaloo, and a "Goldfinger" that proves John Barry's Bond theme could swing even harder with congas and cowbells. Brown had formed his Latin Soul Brothers in 1959, and by the mid-sixties they'd perfected a fusion of hard bop, soul, and Afro-Cuban rhythms that made them essential players in the acid jazz revival three decades later.
Duke Ellington's "Oclupaca" and Cal Tjader's "It Ain't Necessarily So" (from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess) represent the jazz aristocracy, while J.J. Johnson's "Harlem Love Theme" brings the trombonist's bebop credentials to bear on something approaching symphonic soul. John Barry himself appears with On Her Majesty's Secret Service-arguably his finest Bond score, its romanticism and melancholy a world away from the franchise's usual bombast.
The collection closes with The Shadows' "Sleepwalk," the Santo & Johnny instrumental standard given the British guitar group's trademark treatment. It's a fitting endpoint: a song about dreams, rendered by musicians who helped define an era's sound.
What makes Spectrum essential is its curatorial intelligence. Compiled by the Plastic Records brain trust-Plastic Andrea, Dr. Pregunta, Plastic Marco, Massimo Bressan, and Tango Fernandez-the album refuses easy categorization. These aren't "film noir themes" in any literal sense; several tracks have no cinematic origin at all. But they share a mood, a palette, a sense that darkness and elegance are not opposites but collaborators. This is music for the hours between midnight and dawn, when the city belongs to those who know how to listen.
