Umberto

On the bus today I was reading the free newspaper Metro. There was a little piece in it about a one man group called Umberto, who were described as having a John Carpenter/Goblin vibe to them. From the track I heard just now, Temple Room, that's a pretty apt description. Good to see they also do FLAC downloads

http://umberto.bandcamp.com/

Deadly Blvd

A duo from from Montréal who've just released their first EP, Giallo, as a digital download.

As they explain: “We created this music with a mixture of our inspirations, that is horror and sci-fi film music, eighties cartoons music, rock, new wave, etc.... There is no label, no distribution company, we are totally independant and this EP album makes us really proud.”

Check it out at:

http://deadlyblvd.bandcamp.com/
http://www.facebook.com/DeadlyBLVD

Giallo mood mixes

From here:

http://purplezombiedj.blogspot.com/2011/05/giallo-moods-music-for-murder.html

Giallo music mix

Here's some giallo related ear-candy

http://www.mediafire.com/file/zygkjd2zgm2/Theez+Boyz+R+Athletes+Giallo+Mix.mp3

Track listing:

1. Legowelt - Rain Season (Strange Life Records)
2. Antoni Maiovvi - Nightmoves (Seed Records)
3. I-F - Assault On Radical Radio (Disko B)
4. Francesco - Clemente - Suoni Dalle Ombre Oltre (Crème Organization)
5. Motiivi:Tuntematon - Mankind Failed (Kompakt Extra)
6. gatekeeper - Optimus Maximus (Fright Records)
7. The Hasbeens - Fall To Pieces (Frustrated Funk)
8. John Carpenter - The President Is Gone (That's Entertainment Records)
9. Tin Man - Riders (Cheap)
10. Zerkalo - Last Meeting (Frustrated Funk)

Giallo music megamix

Great for how many can you name contests:

http://videotopsy.blogspot.com/2009/12/hyper-giallo-mix-is-here.html

One Suite for the Murderer

A three-band old-style prog rock suite inspired by Deep Red:

Giallo Radio

Another new site well worth checking out: http://www.gialloradio.com/

The House of Weeping Mirrors

Found on the Morte ha no sesso blog: a rather cool soundtrack for an imaginary giallo. Terska there also did the cover art and is clearly a man of many talents :-)

Cinecocktail Calibro 3 / Cinecocktail 4: The Italian Horror Show

These two new releases from Italy's BEAT Records present an interesting take on the Italian film music compilation CD idea by also including a bonus documentary DVDs.

The selections of tracks on the two CD's are a mixed bag, with the poliziotto disc probably shading it on account of not including the kind of late 80s and 90s electronic and rock guitar driven cues found on the horror one. A case could, however, be made for the poliziotto compilation inherently being the easier to make coherent anyway on account of the filone's shorter lifespan, as primarily a 1970s phenomenon, and the narrower range of styles characteristically utilised by its composers.



Both discs feature a number of previously unreleased tracks, like Lalo Gori's infectious theme for Calling All Police Cars and a different take of Francesco De Masi's 'Fay' from The New York Ripper, along with much-compiled favourites like Franco Micalizzi's 'Folk and Violence' from Violent Naples and Ennio Morricone's 'Lizard in a Woman's Skin' theme from the film of the same name.



Unfortunately while the DVDs while they are certainly a good idea – the more we get to hear the people behind these films speaking for themselves the better, as far as I am concerned – their execution leaves a bit to be desired.

The horror documentary, Hanging Shadows, features interview clips with the likes of Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava, Michele Soavi and Roger Fratter, discussing their theories and practice, and presents a good overview of the genre's rise and fall and place in the wider history of cinema, with other contributors including critics, writers and producers.

The one major omission, however, is that there's not really anything about the role of music in the Italian horror film, nor anything from the composers whose music is featured on the CD.

The disc is also marred by some unnecessarily gimmicky direction and the inclusion of decontextualised clips from recent low-budget straight to video type productions by the likes of Fratter that don't really add terribly much to the experience or our understanding. Though a similar criticism might be made of the extra, a music video featuring Menti Criminali and Acid One, the sheer coolness of hearing three guys rapping in Italian about Fulci, Bava and so on proves highly endearing.

Similar post-production trickery also afflicts the documentary on the poliziotto disc, Il Genere. It's different in that it discusses the filone cinema more generally and has more emphasis on the music, with the interviewees including Alessandro Alessandroni, Francesco De Masi and Edda Dell'Orso alongside directors such as Mario Caiano and Umberto Lenzi, both of whom emphasise how much things have changed for the worse in the Italian cinema along with the fact that the B-films they and others made are now better received than they were on their original releases. These interviews, some taking place in the individuals homes or studios, others in what appears to be the context of a festival or awards ceremony, are intercut with footage of Franco Micalizzi and his Big Bubbling Band performing live.

Another problem is that the interviewees aren't identified on screen, meaning that if you don't already know De Masi as the man with the harmonica, Alessandroni as the whistler or Dell'Orso as the voice you may find it difficult knowing quite where to place them and their contributions at first.

Dario Argento: A Musical and Visual Tribute to the Cinema of Argento

This is another one of those book and CD combos which have been coming out of Italy of late. The bulk of the 150-page hardback book presents a chronological pictorial overview of Argento’s career through on-set and still photographs, album covers and posters and is a delight to leaf through.

These are bookended by an introductory overview of the director and his work and two concluding interviews. The first, with Argento, is very brief and dates back a number of years, having previously made an appearance on the Ennio Morricone / Dario Argento Trilogy CD released by DRG in 1995. The second, with Claudio Simonetti, is a bit more substantial and up-to-date. Each piece also suffers from some awkward turns of phrase in the translation from Italian to English, though never so bad as to be unreadable babelfish-ism.

The 16-track CD, which also proceeds in chronological fashion, is more problematic. The first six tracks, representing Morricone’s Animal Trilogy scores and Goblin’s work on Deep Red (Giorgio Gaslini’s contribution there and to the Door into Darkness TV series and Le cinque giornate unsurprisingly absent) are fine.

Suspiria, however, sounds like it is represented not by an original Goblin version but by a later Simonetti re-recordings, with the same also pertaining in the case of Tenebre.

Whilst perhaps adding value to the collector who is likely to already have various other versions of the soundtracks and Simonetti re-recordings, tracks like these really don’t fit with the back-cover claim to “the best tracks from the original film scores”.

One also questions the wisdom of including Steel Grave’s speed metal from Opera and the closing “tribute bonus track,” by Signor Wolf in this regard, especially when these selections seem to come at the expense of anything from Two Evil Eyes, The Phantom of the Opera or, most criminally, The Stendhal Syndrome.

Colossus Projects

Just a "for your information" post:

Colossus, the Finnish progressive music association, has done a number of projects where contemporary progressive bands do new theme suites for films like Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good the Bad and the Ugly. They also have projects based on The Great Silence and Profondo Rosso in the works. Check them out if prog rock is your thing:

http://www.colossus.fi/125/index.php?id=11,0,0,1,0,0

The Giallo's Flame

I got a CD by these guys a while back, kind of a score to an imaginary 70s giallo or poliziotto and very cool. They now have some new stuff out. Enjoy.

http://myspace.com/thegiallosflame

Murder for Pleasure

One of the more curious giallo-related items I have is a CD entitled Murder for Pleasure: giallo & thriller original soundtrack themes, which I picked up through an Ebay auction a few years back. The CD, which has a nice yellow giallo paperback styled cover using an image from one of the What Have You Done to Solange posters, is credited to Gatto nero records, Rome, and copyrighted 1997.



Most curiously, however, it is marked as being "not for sale" and "promotional use only"; with the 28 tracks featured appearing to have been lifted direct from the films themselves, coming with snatches of dialogue and sound effects (gunshots, screams etc.) and suffering from considerable noise and distortion at times.

One can only assume that it was someone's pet project. But who? No-one is credited on the disc, no further releases ever seem to have came from the label, and internet searches reveal nothing further. As a further measure of the disc's obscurity when I queried it on CDDB I got either nothing or, bizarrely, disc 2 of Méér Dan Het Beste Van Elvis Presley





A decade on, meanwhile, heightened awareness of the giallo and an extensive programme of soundtrack reissues from the likes of Digitmovies, Beat and Easy Tempo mean that better versions of almost all the material featured therein are now available.

So as a vaguely seasonal gift for those who want to hear the originals or the odd track like those from Renato Polselli's Delirium that is still unavailable in an official relase (at least to the best of my knowledge) here is a download. If you are the original rights holder and object please let me know and I'll take the link down.

Tracks are at 192 kbps; scans of cover art are included. The total size is about 85MB.

Get it here: http://rapidshare.com/files/9134116/murder_for_pleasure.zip.html

Bruno Nicolai in Giallo

Ask anyone moderately acquainted with Eurocult cinema to name a composer connected with the form and the chances are that they will respond with Ennio Morricone. While this is testament to both the quality and quantity of Morricone's output, the importance of his collaborators - such as multi-instrumentalist Allessandro Allessandroni, vocalist Edda Dell'Orso, conductor and arranger Bruno Nicolai and Allessandroni's group i cantori moderni - to the sound of 60s spaghetti westerns and 70s gialli has often gone largely unacknowledged.

Of these neglected names, that of Nicolai is perhaps the most inexplicable. Born in 1926, he attended the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia, where he first met Morricone, two years his junior. Becoming firm friends, the pair collaborated through the 1960s and early 1970s, before eventually breaking their creative partnership in mysterious and seemingly acrimonious circumstances; the most popular version that Morricone felt Nicola was plagiarising him.

Whatever truly happened – Nicolai died in 1991 and Morricone remains silent on the issue – there is a clear similarity between their work over the two decades. Then again, this is arguably inevitable given Nicolai's roles; one hopes that someday someone with more musical ability and knowledge will perform a quasi-experiment, listening to different permutations of Morricone's and Nicolai's work double blind and seeing how easy it is to tell the difference (if anyone from The Wire is reading, this might make a good “Invisible Jukebox” test). Yet, the fact remains that, even if only sometimes producing pastiches of Morricone, many of Nicolai's 90-plus original scores are of a high standard in themselves and, moreover, make an important contribution to the European pop cinema of the 60s and 70s in scoring films for – among others – Jess Franco, Sergio Corbucci, Ruggero Deodato, Gianfranco Parolini and Umberto Lenzi.

Another reason for the lack of attention given Nicolai's work until recently was its unavailability to all but the most dedicated and well-financed collectors, many scores having only ever been released on limited edition private pressings via Nicolai's own label, Edipan. But now, with Italian label Digitmovies going back to the original master tapes and embarking upon an ambitious re-issue programme of Nicolai and other neglected composers, in most cases with alternate takes and versions hitherto unheard, there is really no excuse not to acquaint oneself.

To date Digitmovies have released six of Nicolai's giallo scores, under the descriptive series title of "Bruno Nicolai in Giallo" – La Coda dello scorpione, Il Tuo Vizio É Una Stanza Chiusa E Solo Io Ho La Chiave, La Dama rossa Uccide sette volte, La Notte che Evelyn usci' dalla tombe, Perche' quelle strane gocce di sangue sui corpo di Jennifer and Tutti i colori del buio – those for two Jess Franco films, 99 Donne and Eugenie De Sade '70.

Of the giallo scores, the one that feels closest to the Nicolai/Franco idiom is perhaps La Notte che Evelyn usci dalla tomba / The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave, directed by Emilio Miraglia and released in 1971. In part this is because the film's dreamlike what-the-hell-is-going-on sensibilities give it a feel not unlike many Franco films such as A Virgin Among the Living Dead – also scored coincidentally by Nicolai – as an uxoricidal nobleman, played by Anthony Steffen, finds himself surrounded by relatives and hangers-on desirous of his wealth and status. It's also, however, because the film's most memorable cue, in the form of the the swami number that plays over the justly famous scene of the intoxicating Erika Blanc performing a coffin striptease – the kind of thing that makes a CD or DVD worthwhile in its own right – is strongly reminiscent of similar psychedelic cues by Nicolai for the Spanish director's Eugénie… the Story of Her Journey Into Perversion and Eugénie a year or so earlier.

The other cuts are a palatable mix of romantic and suspenseful atmospheres, along with the odd party/vocal number in the shape of the diegetically located La Festa. Perhaps inevitably they don't all work outwith the context of the film, but most, including the gentle, haunting Il Fantasma di Evelyn and the main title theme (a longer version of which is also presented as one of the two bonus tracks) remain listenable and evocative enough in their own right.

Psychedelic cues are also to the fore in Tutti i colori del buio / All the Colours of the Dark, one of three titles here directed by the talented Sergio Martino and featuring ever-charming leading man George Hilton and no fewer than four starring genre queen Edwige Fenech. A giallo take on Rosemary's Baby, it's the tale of a young Londoner who, having tragically lost her baby in an automobile accident a few months earlier, gets drawn into a satanic cult by her new neighbour and increasingly comes to suspect and doubt all around – though with Hilton as her husband you can see why…

With many of the cues having magical titles – Magico Incontro, Medium, Suggestione, Esorcismo, Ipnosi etc. – the balance is more in favour of the experimental and uneasy listening side of things than on Evelyn, though the likes of the sitar solo Evocazione (performed by Allessandroni as another reminder of how close-knit the Italian soundtrack world was at this time) and the two versions of Sabba (with I Cantori Moderni providing the vocals to make the same point) come close to being classics of easy pop-psychedelic trash. With no fewer than 16 of the 29 tracks being previously unreleased versions, there more to make this disc worth buying for old-time collectors though also consequently less in the way of actual variation in the music.

The second Nicolai/Martino collaboration, Il Tuo vizio é una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave / Your Vice is a Locked Door and Only I Have the Key / Excite Me / Eye of the Black Cat / Gently Before She Dies (going for the record here with the alternative titles?) also dates from 1972 and again gives Fenech a prominent role. She plays the bisexual niece of Luigi Pistilli's alcoholic writer, who conspires with and against him and his wife, played by Anita Strindberg, in a giallo take on Edgar Allen Poe's perennial The Black Cat. In keeping with this, Nicolai's score – his work on Franco's Dracula might also be worth comparing here – is more classical sounding, with harpischord and strings predominating and the 20 tracks identified only by sequence numbers rather than the specific moments in the film they accompany; you can tell that track 12 goes with a high-tension moment while track 18 has a more driving chase music feel to it but that's about all.

The third Nicolai/Martin collaboration, La Coda dello Scorpione / The Case of the Scorpion's Tail, dates from a year earlier. A comparatively straightforward thriller, the film casts Hilton as an insurance agent, one of several people interested in the fortune inherited by adulteous wife Evelyn Stewart/Ida Galli after her husband dies in a plane crash; Fenech sits it out in favour of Galli, Strindberg and Janine Reynaud. With most of the action taking place in Greece, there's an awkward diegetic scene-setting cue as the sixth track on the CD, but on reflection it's no worse than, say, the music that accompanies the changing of the guards in Marcello Giombini's score for Joe D'Amato's similarly set Anthropophagous the Beast.

Otherwise it's a different story, the six variants on the Foglie Rosse and Vento D'Autumno themes providing lush, romantic music that constrast well with the 25 suspenseful and moody La Coda… sequences, where edgy percussion and strangulated trumpet generally predominate. The 32nd and final track, Shadows, is vocal piece that, like much Euro-crooning, doesn't quite pull it off.

Also of note is the title theme: while generally counting amongst the best cuts on each disc, The Case of the Scorpion's Tall's main sequence is truly a standout, its simple ostenato overlaid by menacing guitar wails and squawks getting you into that giallo mood right away.

Hilton and Fenech were together again for spaghetti western specialist Giuliano Carnimeo / Anthony Ascott's 1972 entry into the giallo filone, Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? / What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing On Jennifer's Body? / The Case of the Bloody Iris / Erotic Blue (another contender for the too many AKAs crown), the former playing a model who moves into a murder-prone apartment block designed by the latter, a wealthy playboy; also on hand are Fenech's dumb friend and ex-husband – who has a penchant for bizarre sex games and wants her to rejoin his cult – and a predatory lesbian neighbour…

The trashiness of this scenario, by frequent giallo scribe Ernesto Gastaldi, is mirrored somewhat by Nicolai's music, although, as the liner notes indicate, only around half the numbered cues appearing on the CD actually found their way into the final cut of the film.

As it is, the title theme motifs, which recur throughout, give the music a bright and breezy musak-like quality as as much as a suspenseful one, with those tracks that eschew this approach, like the diegetic solo violin on track nine, failing to make immediate sense outwith the context of the film itself.

Miraglia's 1972 giallo La Dama rossa uccide sette volte / The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, features neither Fenech nor Hilton, instead giving the starring role to Barbara Bouchet. As the title suggests, there's a bit of a fairy-tale vibe to this one, with titular woman in red supposedly returning from the tomb – just like Evelyn the year before, perhaps – every century to kill seven people.

This fantastical air is mirrored in Nicolai's music, with the title theme, track one, beginning with lullably style voices – which might be compared with the children's chorus on Morricone's score for Aldo Lado's Chi l'ha vista morire? / Who Saw Her Die? of the same year – before going into a more baroque idiom on tracks two and three that thereafter predominates although some cuts, like track four have more of a bossa nova/easy listening vibe to them; all told it's a pleasing mix.

Overall, if there's sometimes a degree of sameness between many of these scores – listening to them back-to-back as I write this I think I would have difficulty placing a lot of the tracks – they are also effective within the context of the films and, for the most part, eminently listenable outwith. Clearly a labour of love on the part of Digitmovies, and well presented in terms of accompanying liner notes and illustrative material – poster and still reproductions etc – they're well worth supporting, even if you may not feel the need to buy each and every one.

http://brunonicolai.homestead.com/nicolai.html - Bruno Nicolai tribute page