C’est Disco! Finally got our hands on some copies of this excellent comp of Italian new wave, cold wave, minimal wave, et al on Spittle Records. It’s a nice companion piece to Ecstatic’s survey of Euro experimental electronics released last year, but much more concise and easier to penetrate. In the 1980s, jaded Italian punks were looking to the US and UK for inspiration, taking up synthesizers and drum machines and putting their own spin on the sound (in the same way they reinterpreted disco, with similarly tasty results). These 13 tracks represent the breadth of what was bubbling in the Italian underground, from propulsive coldwave (Le Masque’s “Mother And Son”) to ACR-style punk funk (La Maison’s “40 Secondi”) to proto-new beat sounds (Monuments’ “Oblivious”) to straight up Bowie impersonators (Fockewulf 190’s “We Are Colder”). A good portion of these tracks will surely tickle the fancy of Dopplereffekt & Drexciya fans: N.O.I.A.’s “Forbidden Planet,” Pankow’s “God’s Deneuve” and Luc Orient’s “Night In Paris” all feature that signature phat analogue bass sound implemented on many of James Stinson and Gerald Donald’s deep sea techno torpedos. This vinyl edition takes the best tracks from the CD edition and adds 5 more, including State Of Art’s atmospheric “Your Eyes” and 2+2=5’s gorgeous vocoder ballad “Mathematic’n Logarithm,” two of the best tracks of the set. Full color pic sleeve with printed inner sleeve containing full liner notes (in Italiano). Recommended.

• black vinyl pressing
• includes 5 tracks not on CD version
• printed inner sleeve w/ Italian liner notes
• music label: Spittle Records 2018

reviewed by hannibal chew 02/2018