Dialogo Italy Schallplatten & CDs

Review: British and American artists working in the experimental scene were in fine fettle during the mid to late 1970s, though it is a rather under-investigated time. This new, vast and comprehensive box set from Dialogo's - made in full collaboration with all of the composers or their estates - serves up all ten of the albums Brian Eno's Obscure Records label put out. Each one has been remastered and an extensive booklet is included making this an essential collection that documents some of the most vital sounds to emerge during the second half of the 20th Century.

Review: The long-awaited Dialogo reissue of a true Italian library music gem, originally released in 1974. Made by renowned pianist and composer Amedeo Tommasi under the alias Jarrell, Industria 2000 is a little-harked avant-garde mantelpiece, fusing hypno-synth excursuses with industrial quizzicalities, presaging the works of John Carpenter and the noise and industrial movements to follow. Now available again in a limited run of just 300 copies, in a faithful replica of the original packaging, it forms part of a broader ecumenism by Dialogo to highlight the Italian arm of RCA's 'Original Cast' series, the imprint through which Industria 2000 was originally released. Long regarded as one of the most forward-thinking experimental library records, Jarrell was able to jerry-rig twelve tracks of mechanised environments and abstract synthesis, and offer a neat intro to Italian library music at that.

Review: A reissue of an early work by acclaimed avant-gardist and pioneer Alvin Lucier, 'Bird And Person Dyning' is a spoken word and musique concrete pipe dream, spanning the furthest reaches of weirdo acousmatism, phase interference, and the transmission of sound through physical objects. Both pieces on this LP explore cyborgish concepts, the first being a grotesque of the human voice, and the second exploring the idea of an electronic bird. Lucier's standing at this point in his career puts him squarely in a cohort of pioneers who emerged in the early 1960s.

Review: Gianni Marchetti's 1977-78 LPs Equinox and Solstitium are truly rare gems from Italy's library music scene. Long thought lost, these tracks were unearthed from original DAT tapes and remastered for vinyl. They are loved for their ethereal, imaginative compositions as Marchetti's work blends driving rhythms, lush strings and intoxicating jazz sounds that offer a cinematic, dreamy feel. These albums, previously promotional-only and still highly coveted by collectors, now shine as part of Dialogo's initiative exploring RCA's "Original Cast" series. They lay bare the brilliance of Italian library music.

Review: This is the first-ever reissue of Gianni Marchetti's 1978 LP Solstitium, which was originally released as part of RCA's "Original Cast" series in limited promo copies and has long been considered one of the most rare and enigmatic pieces of Italian library music. Library music was primarily created for television, radio and film but often yielded hidden gems that fused jazz, lounge and soul into storytelling vignettes of sounds. Marchetti's wonderful Solstitium is a prime example of innovation within this space which rightly remains a classic in the history of Italian music.

Review: As well as sporting a superb moustache, Enrico Rava was also the first Italian jazz artist to break out onto the international scene. He was born in Trieste in 1939 and 'Pupa o Crisalide' is one of the most interesting works in his catalogue. It sums up what he was about in the first chapter of his career with a selection of treks made with different musicians alongside him including Giovanni Tommaso, Bruno Biriaco, Franco D'Andrea and Michele Ascolese. There are fiery, funky and edgy tunes as well as jazz-rock inspire fusions and then more serene and Latin flavour jams in the second half.

Review: "One might thus regard the Welsh rarebit as a Machine in which a process is applied to the conditioning and perception of the world of bread and cheese." Suffice to say, John White might not have had the same ideas about what constitutes Machine Music back in 1976 as you do today. This is also the first time we've ever managed to get a reference to Welsh rarebit into the first line of writing about a record, so everyone is learning something today. "The Machines" White refers to are the individual tracks themselves, all recorded between 1967 and 1972 and all comprising different combinations of a thing. Six pairs of "bass melody instruments" made 'Autumn Countdown Machine', different permutations of "the articulations 'ging, gang, gong, gung, ho!'" comprise 'Jews Harp Machine'. And 'Son of Gothic Chord' is crafted from the sequential chord progression of four keyboard players, spanning an octave. Conceptual experimental and wildly imaginative stuff on the borderline of electronica, abstract, mathematical and something otherworldly.