For 30 or so years, the Milan based imprint, Vinyl Magic, has been yielding an endlessly rich vein of adventurous Italian music, offering particular focus to reissues of 1970s prog and library music rarities. Their catalog represents some of the best there is. Now the label returns with one of their most exciting releases to date, the first ever vinyl reissue of Giuliano Sorgini’s legendary 1972 LP, Elettroformule. Among the greatest objects in the canon of Library music, its radical approaches to sound and ideas make it equally one of the most important, rarely encountered artifacts of the Italian avant-garde, holding its own with the best of any electronic experimental music of its era.

At first listen, and particularly given its inclusion within the legendary Creel Pone CD-R series, Giuliano Sorgini’s 1972 LP, Elettroformule, would logically locate itself among the great, concurrent efforts of electronic experimentalism emerging from European studios like GRM and EMS. Fascinatingly, it belongs to a far more complex and dynamic history, that of Italian Library music, a body of recordings almost entirely commissioned and owned by record labels, to be licensed for use within television programs, radio, and film as stock or background music. Despite the obvious limitations of the context - working in the belly of the beast - particularly in Italy, many composers turned it to their advantage, writing, producing, and recording albums that ranked among the most interesting and ambitious works of their era - pure experimental exploration, standing with the heights of the 20th Century avant-garde. Giuliano Sorgini is among the greatest of these, and Elettroformule ranks among his best.

A masterful blend of spectrally-processed sounds, electronics, Musique Concrete, minimalistic passages and harder-hitting experimentations, emerging from the remarkable hands of Giuliano Sorgini, across the two sides of Elettroformule, thirteen improvisations unfold with astounding scope, generated with the sole aid of electronic instruments. Bristling textures, unbridled rhythms and tones, bound by wild structures and visionary, deconstructed traces of melody, flirt between images of hope and dystopian gloom - pure abstraction, balanced between the realms of ambience and noise.

Absolutely brilliant from start to finish, Giuliano Sorgini’s Elettroformule is nearly impossible to get off the turntable once the needle drops. A true legend in the field of library music that touches so much more.