As exciting as library music reissues get, the newly launched imprint, Sounds From The Screen, drops the first ever reissue of Bruno Nicolai’s legendary 1975 LP Rendez-vous. A towering work of sweeping scale and scope, once heard there can be little question as to why it has retained a reputation for being among the greatest holy grails in the entire canon of Italian library music for decades on end.

It’s been an important year so far for the legacy of the great Italian composer Bruno Nicolai. Not only have we witnessed long awaited reissues of seminal albums like Geminus and Espressioni, but Dialogo dropped the astounding 10 LP/CD box set, Dimensioni Sonore, of a sprawling body of work co-created with his longtime collaborator Ennio Morricone. Now Sounds From The Screen has upped the ante with an absolutely beautiful reissue of Nicolai’s 1975 masterstroke, Rendez-vous. An imaginary soundtrack, sprawling and visionary in scope, that launches from its first funky notes into a realm of unabashed experimentalism and tense, sweeping orchestration, that has left us teetering on the edges of our seats.

While remarkably prolific and hugely important, Bruno Nicolai’s name remains all too obscure for most beyond a small circle of devoted fans. This is partially due to the fact that, like many of the most talented Italian composers of his generation, he chose to unfurl his wild innovations within the anonymity provided by creating music for film and television, and has been somewhat further obscured by the prominence of his close friend and regular collaborator, Ennio Morricone, who he met as a student at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome.

Between the 1960s and the 80s, Morricone and Nicolai formed an unstoppable team, creating dozens of soundtracks together. But, like his more famous partner in crime, Nicolai produced an astounding discography on his own within the contexts of soundtracks and library music.

Given its title and striking cover, Rendez-vous gives a first impression of being a soundtrack for an as yet unknown film. In reality, these elements are a ruse, alluding to a film that only existed in Nicolai’s mind. The album was, like so much of the composer’s work, an effort that deployed the freedoms activated by the context of library music, to reach new, wild and liberated experimental forms. Launching with the title track, driven by a repetitive, funky rhythm and elasticated melodies, the album quickly progresses toward more abstract territories, carved by lush orchestration that vacillates between sublime harmonic, tense distances, and space tonal functions, all placed into a masterful balance that reveals itself to be startling at every turn, peppered across its length by muted trumpet playing that many believe to have been performed by his friend Morricone.

A truly stunning effort of rare artistry that blurs audible recognition between acoustic instruments and synthesized sound, Nicolai’s Rendez-vous - finally reissued for the first time ever since its initial 1975 release on Gemelli - is as brilliant as Italian music gets.