Lucky Restock - Limited Quantities Please note: these are original copies that may show minor sleeve wear due to long-term storage. The vinyl is in excellent condition.  Call it psychedelic. Call it lounge. Call it beat, or jazz-funk, or something that doesn't have a name yet. The truth is, no single word captures what happens when four Italian studio musicians lock into a groove at 10 AM, knowing their work will soundtrack a car commercial, a crime drama, or a soft-core feature they'll never see. They play like their lives depend on it anyway.

Stroboscopica was the compilation that started it all - the first volume in a trilogy that would establish Plastic Records as the definitive excavators of Italian sonorizzazione. Released in 1998, it gathered sixteen tracks from the vaults of Cinecittà and the archives of Cometa Edizioni, music originally pressed in tiny runs for industry use only. What emerged was a revelation: an entire parallel universe of Italian music, invisible to the public but teeming with invention.

I Marc 4 anchor the collection with "Matto Grosso" and "Hyde Park." The quartet - Maurizio Majorana on bass, Antonello Vannucchi at the Hammond, Roberto Podio on drums, and Carlo Pes on guitar - were the house band for an era. Their name derived from their initials (though the "A" sometimes stood for Armando Trovajoli, whose compositions they frequently performed). They backed Ennio Morricone and Piero Umiliani, scored television themes and B-movies, and along the way invented a sound: tight, funky, slightly unhinged, capable of shifting from bossa nova elegance to fuzz-drenched psychedelia within a single track.

I Gres contribute four cuts - "Duo Balls," "Voleur," "Restless," and "To Jimmy" - each one a masterclass in mood construction. The group, founded by Silvano Chimenti and featuring organist Giorgio Carnini, drummer Enzo Restuccia, and maestro Roberto Pregadio, recorded three albums for the Globevision and Gemelli labels between 1974 and 1975. "Restless" alone has become a holy grail among breakbeat collectors, its drums sampled and looped into countless hip-hop productions.

I Pulsar - the Milan-based ensemble behind the Milano Violenta soundtrack - offer "Leyla Theme," "Walking At Sunrise," and "Cat Theme," three pieces that hover between menace and seduction. Franco Micalizzi, whose poliziottesco scores would later surface in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, contributes the tense "Affanno." Sandro Brugnolini provides "Vortice" and "Reaction," compositions that feel like sonic storyboards for films never made.

And then there's Alessandro Alessandroni with "Il Porto" - a reminder that the man who whistled on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and whose guitar defined the spaghetti western sound was also, quietly, one of the most prolific and inventive library composers of his generation. Francesco De Masi closes the set with "Altalena Party," bringing the same cinematic sweep he applied to his crime scores and westerns.

The subtitle says it all: "Italian 70's psychedelic b-movies soundtracks and sonorizations." But that undersells what's actually here. This is music made by conservatory-trained musicians given freedom to experiment, working fast, working cheap, and producing work that has outlasted the films it was meant to accompany. Stroboscopica was the map that showed collectors where to dig. Twenty-five years later, the territory it revealed still hasn't been fully explored.