The 1970s Italian Underground

It’s not too hard to understand why Italian underground music was so creative, so profligate, so urgent across the seventies, at least if you believe that disrupted societies intensify creative impulses. That decade came to be known in Italy as the Anni di piombo – the Years of Lead – an extended period of political and social upheaval, in fact, that starts in the late sixties, roughly in line with student and worker uprisings across Europe and extends through to the late eighties.

This period in Italian history is marked by terrorism from both far-right and far-left organisations. The far-right targeted and bombed social infrastructure – railway stations, piazzas – while the far-left organisations, such as the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse), were responsible for kidnapping and assassinating former prime minister Aldo Moro. During the seventies, there was also increased social unrest; collaboration between labour movements and student activism; the development and sustenance of militant movements like Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio; the free radio broadcaster Radio Alice; powerful developments for the Italian LGBTQ+ movement; the radicalised Movimento del ’77; the severing of connections between the Italian Communist Party and the Autonomia Operaia…

In short, it was an incredibly turbulent time. Across the same decade, and no doubt both in the shadow of, and in at least ideological allegiance with, some of the progressive movements and developing conversations of the time, Italian popular music seemed to open to multifarious influences. Italy seemed particularly seduced by progressive rock, and their contribution to the genre’s development is both profound and lasting, both through the more over-the-top ‘symphonic’ prog groups and a more experimental, avant-garde side to prog.

Similarly, developments in modern classical and the avant-garde were communicating across the seas and the continent, and a radical underground was quietly fomenting in Italy, across various cities and through various cells of creative engagement. Coupled with an industry of soundtrack music that was pretty much peerless – headed up by legendary figures like Ennio Morricone and Piero Piccioni – a contemporaneous explosion in creative and experimental film and horror and giallo, and the ongoing development of Italian library music (recorded often as background for television broadcast and film)…

Well, there was plenty going down in Italy. That this is but a provisional and far from all-encompassing snapshot of everything that was happening tells us that Italy was working at a particularly fierce creative clip through the seventies. Their underground seemed in productive allegiance, at times, with the mainstream, and if there’s a key figure to this guide of significant and sometimes underheralded albums, it’s prog-turned-avant-turned-pop-star Franco Battiato, whose run of eight albums across the decade is a near-peerless narrative of progressive rock turning into hardline classical minimalism. He brought his friends along for the ride, too – albums from Giusto Pio, Juri Camisasca and others probably wouldn’t exist without Battiato’s spirit and generosity,

Battiato’s turn to mainstream pop in the early eighties didn’t necessarily signal the end of an era – after all, Roberto Cacciapaglia, another key figure in the Italian underground, did much the same with the bizarre and wonderful Ann Steele Album. The lines between under- and overground seemed quite fluid, at the time, in Italy, at least looking from the outside in. And yet there did seem to be a turn from the tougher edges and more radical edits of albums by the likes of Pierrot Lunaire (Gudrun) and Nascita della Sfera (Per Una Scultura Di Ceschia) to music that was more ambient, ‘fourth-world’, exoticised: the minimalism got gentler, less rigorous.

To be fair, that narrative was played out across the globe in various ways. But this guide was intended to celebrate the breadth, the depth, the wildness, the ideological and aesthetic rigour of Italian underground music of the seventies. With logic sometimes found wanting, I recognise there are names missing – Area / Demetrio Stratos, Claudio Rocchi, Il Balletto Di Bronzo… But the list here takes in plenty – Battiatio and his collaborators; the prog-folk of Saint Just and Lucio Battisti; minimalist composition, mangled tape edits, and yet more.

Some of this material has been reissued by labels, many from Italy, and I’d fully recommend checking out the catalogues of current imprints such as Die Schachtel, Black Sweat, and Soave, not just for their excellent archival work, but also for the way they often interface the old with the new, in a tacit recognition that the avant-garde and underground in Italy is every bit as vibrant now as it was fifty years ago. But we are in different times. And each of the albums in this guide is both eternally resonant, and a snapshot of just how strong the creativity coursed through the veins of the Italian counterculture across ten long years.

Jon Dale

Sei Note in Logica

Roberto Cacciapaglia
Sei Note in Logica cover

One of the masterpieces of Italian minimalism – and there are more than a few of those – Sei Note In Logica is Cacciapaglia’s most enduring composition, much as his later Ann Steel Album is his key contribution to pop song. Here, he’s learned the best lessons from the likes of Steve Reich, as you’d expect, and the resulting thirty-minute piece makes simplicity lush, with the gentle interweaving of patterns for four voices and orchestral ensemble (strings, woodwinds, marimba etc.) beautifully managed. The delirious interjections from electronics, often when least expected, add to the glorious confusion. What’s most convincing about Sei Note In Logica is the effortless with which it transcends its structural constraints; this makes it a key composition, not just in Italian minimalism, but the history of minimalism in general.

Fetus

Franco Battiato
Fetus cover

Franco Battiato’s first few albums – particularly Fetus and Pollution – have rightly come to represent Italian progressive rock amongst its most experimental and absurdist. But there’s so much more going on here than just random experiment: with Fetus, you can hear shadowings of Battiato’s later, more minimalist/experimental phase, particularly in his ongoing returns to a mysterious, tangled melody for synth. The songs sound, sometimes, like they’re about to break into full prog indulgence, but something keeps them in check – see the rattling middle section of “Energia,” which has the same unbridled enthusiasm and rhythmic churn as the Velvets-inspired early Can. There are lush miniatures for voice and acoustic guitar; tear-stroked tunes ringing out over spongy synthesis (“Una cellula”); folksy melodies for violin; slapstick comedy moments – it’s all over the place, but gloriously so.

Aktuala

Aktuala
Aktuala cover

A Milanese collective headed up by avant-world-music lifer Walter Maioli, in consort with his wife Laura and a range of other players, Aktuala sometimes get pegged as the Italian Third Ear Band. There’s something to it, I guess, in so far as both bands imply digging into the distant past to access the future; they’re also both in tune with the amorphousness and improvisatory spirit of a late sixties, early seventies counterculture. But Aktuala always felt more spacious and more informed by improvised jazz than other groups undertaking similar astral explorations. They know how to meander – the first few minutes of “When The Light Began” take time to pull into focus, but when Aktuala find their way, locking into unison phrases around the three-minute mark, there’s a gentle melodic sensibility that gets quietly teased out across the album; tunes pass from instrument to instrument, slowly mutating, while aleatory drift plays out as the backdrop.

I Fiori del Sole

Danilo Lorenzini, Michele Fedrigotti
I Fiori del Sole cover

A mystifying set of brief pieces for keyboard from Fedrigotti and Lorenzini, I Fiori Del Sole is another of the great run of albums that Franco Battiato produced and oversaw for the Italian avant-garde record label, Cramps. Both musicians are classical pianists; Fedrigotti graduated from Milan Conservatory, while Lorenzini studied at the Conservatory G. Verdi alongside Antonio Ballista, another significant name in the Italian underground, for his performances on Battiato albums. These are simple works, steeped in the duo’s collective histories with classical music, but granted a distinct otherness when fed through the abstracting lens of Battiato and co.’s prog-adjacent aesthetic. I Fiori Del Sole very much feels as though it’s fallen from somewhere unknown, and hasn’t quite found its place in the history of minimalist composition, though you can certainly read this material as precursory to modern composers such as Sarah Davachi, who bring early music and minimalism together in a similar fashion.

Saint Just

Saint Just
Saint Just cover

Saint Just released two albums of lovely, fragile prog-folk across the mid-seventies, both on the legendary Harvest label. At this stage, the group were a trio, including Jenny Sorrenti (sister of Alan Sorrenti, whose 1982 album Aria is well worth hearing, and who guests here), Toni Verde, and Robert Fix. While Verde was the conceptualist behind the album, Sorrenti’s vocals sealed the deal, her soaring tone reminiscent of English folk singers such as Maddy Prior and Jacqui McShee. Saint Just’s music merged interests in folk and progressive rock with a keen eye toward early and medieval music, and they seemed to have a modular approach to song construction, such that the extended opener, “Il Flume Inondo”, moves through various phases, returning to circular figures for guitar and saxophone, textures melting into each other, structures toppling before being slowly reconstructed by the musicians. It’s a quiet thrill of an album, and expansive in a way that much contemporaneous acid-folk could only dream of.

Battiato

Franco Battiato
Battiato cover

The peak of Battiato’s experimental phase, and to these ears, his best album. Battiato has the titular artist embracing minimalism to its fullest – of the two side-long tracks here, “Za” is a simple, yet compelling meditation on two chords for piano, with the pianist, Antonio Ballista, using the damper pedal to subtly alter what we hear from the instrument, such that it achieves ghostly resonance, the afterlife of the tones ringing out sympathetically. The other side, “Café-Table-Musik”, is my personal favourite piece of music ever composed by Battiato, a beautiful yet unsettling series of snapshots, from lovely piano-and-voice meanderings, through spoken word interludes, to sharp edits that cut to sudden drama – it has the disruptive spirit of Godard at his creative peak. Battiato would release two more experimental albums (including the equally compelling mini, Juke Box) before taking a sharp right turn into a successful career in pop stardom, though there’d always remain something quite odd about his music, even at its most commercial. But this album, somehow, fully captures his essence.

Uno Zingaro di Atlante Con un Fiore a New York

N.A.D.M.A.
Uno Zingaro di Atlante Con un Fiore a New York cover

N.A.D.M.A. stands for Natural Arkestra Da Maya Alta, who were a free jazz / improvising outfit working in Italy in the 1970s. Uno Zingaro Di Atlante Con Un Fiore A New York (A Gypsy From Atlas With A Flower In New York) was the only album they released during that decade, and it’s an excellent example of the intersection of multiple genres – free jazz and free improvisation, of course, but there are also touches of folk music in here, which was a regular occurrence in the Italian underground, and they’re clearly in touch with histories of the avant-garde, both academic and otherwise, probably thanks to various members’ visual arts backgrounds. Some of the players would go on to work with legends such as Don Moye and Mario Schiano, but the key to N.A.D.M.A. was subsuming experience and ambition into group sound; Uno Zingaro is a great example of such interactive playing, and its sense of space is particularly impressive, even when the members work up a collective head of steam. Check out the Alga Marghen releases by Quartetto and Mosconi/Klok/Bonora for further revelations.

Dai Primitivi All'elettronica

Futuro Antico
Dai Primitivi All'elettronica cover

Futuro Antico were a short-lived trio, formed by Walter Maioli of Aktuala with Riccardo Sinigaglia and Burkina Faso musician Gabin Dabiré. Maoili and crew recorded this material in 1980, but it sat unreleased for another decade; by the early eighties, it seems, the desire for free-floating, drone and raga-based improvisations such as featured on Dai Primitivi All’Elettronica was drying up. That’s a shame, as this is a superior example of the form, which is no surprise given Maioli’s penchant for hypnotic expansion through music. The trio are all packing an impressive armoury of instruments, but the art is in the application, and they are sensitive musicians, using the purr of tambura as grounding force for entangled wind and keys; it’s sensitively played, and sensuous in effect, a music that unspools while drawing and following the straight line.

Il Canto Dell'arpa e del Flauto

Pepe Maina
Il Canto Dell'arpa e del Flauto cover

Pepe Maina’s debut album, released in 1977, picks up some of the threads laid down by the likes of Aktuala – there’s an emergent fourth-world energy to some of Il canto dell’arpa e del flauto (The song of the harp and the flute); elsewhere, Maina sketches in the kind of ambience that was being explored within the gentler ends of progressive rock and Krautrock, and indeed, some moments here are tinged with the otherworldliness that characterises groups like Popol Vuh. The most seductive thing about it is the drift of it all, and the way it flicks, casually, through indexes of possibility, often across the same song – the eleven-minute title track shifts between phases before landing on a gorgeous, near-opaque guitar-and-flute reverie. There’s a live insert; gently struck zither; birdsong, burbling electronics, and sky-bound reels from guitar that are pure Daniel Fischelscher (on album highlight “Spring Song”). Very lovely.

La Finestra Dentro

Juri Camisasca
La Finestra Dentro cover

Milanese composer Roberto aka Juri Camisasca is one of the many interesting composers who spun through Franco Battiato’s orbit. The two met during military service; Battiato would end up co-producing, along with Pino Massara, Camisasca’s debut album, La Finestra Destro. It’s a shockingly mature set for someone composing in their early twenties, though the intensity of the performances certainly signals someone who’s working through the anxieties of growing into adulthood. Something about the explosive force of Camisasca’s performances reminds of British singer-songwriter Peter Hammill in solo form, though on quieter, more reflective songs, like “Ho Un Grande Vuota Nella Testa,” there are intimations of the pastoralism of Bill Fay, or John Cale at his most poised. He’d go on to release a few more singles in the mid-seventies, and work with Battiato and and Lino Capra Vaccina, but by the end of the decade, Camisasca had taken his vows and became a Benedictine monk.

Per Una Scultura Di Ceschia

Nascita Della Sfera
Per Una Scultura Di Ceschia cover

An oft-overlooked Italian avant-prog album from the late seventies, Per una scultura di Ceschia (For a Sculpture by Ceschia) by Nascita della Sfera (Birth of the Sphere) was a collective helmed by Carlo Barbiera. As the title intimates, the album’s based around the sculptural work of Luciano Ceschia, though you’d forgive the passing listener for not making an immediate connection between the wide-ranging music here and sculptural practice. Barbiera’s vision is wide-ranging here, and it’s surprising to hear acoustic guitar interludes amid this electro-acoustic edit-scape that feel like they fell off the back of a Takoma album – it’s pure Americana. Elsewhere, gusts of noise shatter the calm, deep divining electronics stumble drunkenly over dramatic piano interjections, and vocal clips and birdsong chatter into the void. There’s plenty of bucolic loveliness here, but it’s always disrupted by the brutish cut of the tape.

Transvitaexpress (Racconto Psicofonico Dell'aldilà)

Marcello Giombini, Vincenzo Barbarino
Transvitaexpress (Racconto Psicofonico Dell'aldilà) cover

One of the great puzzlers of Italian underground music, Transvitaexpress: Racconto psicofonico dell’aldilá is out there on a limb, even within the context of avant experimentation in Italy in the seventies. Marcello Giombini was a composer best known for film scores – he’d written soundtracks for countless Spaghetti Westerns and giallo films – but Transvitaexpress had Giombini particularly curious about the possibilities of tape editing and construction. While the album has some choice passages of electronic non-pop, with texts from Barbarino, the most compelling aspects of Transvitaexpress are its attempts at narrative through tape manipulation, nudging the story along with curious edits of electronics, found sound, field recordings, and other sonic detritus, the better to realise Giombini’s delirious ‘psychophonic’ tale. Given Giombini’s grounding in soundtracks and library music, it’s no surprise that there’s a cinematic cast to the album, but it also speaks to the experimentation that was inherent, yet often implicit, in those genres.

Motore Immobile

Giusto Pio
Motore Immobile cover

Beautifully static compositions from Giusto Pio, another artist from Franco Battiato’s circle of collaborators. He was initially Battiato’s violin teacher but came to play quite a central role in Battiato’s creative practice, as producer and performer – they would even go on to co-compose a Eurovision Song Contest entry. That’s far away from the world inhabited by Motore Immobile, though. The work here is static, though not placid – there’s a tension at play through this heavenly slice of deep minimalism that keeps the attentive listener close to the edge of their seat. The constant presence of the organ drone is leavened by gentle interjections from violin, voice, and piano, each of whose presence feels fundamental to the composition. There’s no excess, no flourish. The two keyboard players, Danilo Lorenzini and Michele Fedrigotti, would release an album produced by Battiato in the late seventies, too. This little cabal of classical-cum-minimalist-cum-prog-pop artists were onto something heavy in the late seventies; thankfully, we have the recorded evidence.

Insiememusicadiversa

Insiememusicadiversa
Insiememusicadiversa cover

Founded in the mid 1970s in Umbria, Insiememusicadiversa presented to the world the free-sound vision of Tercilio Mancinelli. On this, the only Insiememusicadiversa album, you can hear the playfulness of Mancinelli’s vision, explored in consort with other musicians Paolo Piselli and Angelo Petronella. Their freely performed music often came about through fantastically complex and creative graphic scores, some of which are reproduced in Italian label Die Schachtel’s 2005 reissue of Insiememusicadiversa; of course, the only hints these provide are structural, and it’s the listening that does the trick. It helps that the three musicians seem preternaturally sensitive, such that the abstraction they’re exploiting here never feels alienating. There are creepy passages of horror-film synthesis, abstruse percussive clattering a la Limpe Fuchs and Anima, wild and free vocalisations; bare-hands grappling with piano innards… Yet it’s much more than just period piece free improv; the incoherence somehow coheres into a document that tells us much about the freedoms of its times.

Picchio Dal Pozzo

Picchio dal Pozzo
Picchio Dal Pozzo cover

Picchio Dal Pozzo (Woodpecker From the Well) formed in 1976 in Genoa, Italy; they’re still around, though they’re not very active, and they’ve only managed five albums in their near-fifty years of existence. That being said, when you’ve made an album as extraordinary as their self-titled debut, you’re allowed to rest on your laurels for a while. Picchio Dal Pozzo is often read as an Italian take on the Canterbury Scene sound, and there’s something in that observation, as they have a kind of limberness, and lightness of touch, that recalls The Soft Machine at their sly, playful best. But they’re not reducible to mere Canterbury tribute. They often play at a fiercer clip, and their focus on mind-numbing repetition that’s repeatedly rumbled by blats of space synth and floating, surrealist vox… Well, it could feel a bit like Gong, but Picchio Dal Pozzo have their feet far more firmly planted in the earth.

Albergo Intergalattico Spaziale

Albergo Intergalattico Spaziale
Albergo Intergalattico Spaziale cover

It’s not exactly a unique trajectory, from successful sixties beat-pop group (I Giganti) to strange, unravelled avant-prog explorations, but that’s what Mino Di Martino did when he turned his attention to this notionally solo project. The cover of Albergo Intergalattico Spaziale (Intergalactic Space Hotel) is just the first of many arresting, oddly alienating things about this 1978 album, where Di Martino is joined by vocalist Terra Di Benedetto. The latter sings with preternatural calm, which feels all the weirder as she’s often marooned in massive lakes of droning organ and clanging, rolling cymbals and rumbling toms. Elsewhere, mellotron, synths and electro-acoustic experiments give the album an appealingly frazzled edge; it’s as though Di Martino’s trying to navigate his way out of an eclipse. The spectral voices on “Senza Titolo,” lost in their own echoplexed maze, sound almost exactly like halation looks. A particularly beautiful moment on an album rich with beauty.

La Coda Della Tigre

Prima Materia
La Coda Della Tigre cover

On La Coda Della Tigre (The Tail Of The Tiger), Prima Materia set their stall very clearly and cleanly – massed vocal improvisations that grab hold of long-held tones and let them breathe and morph in subtle convolutions. There’s an exploration of overtone here, sure, but the real pleasure is in hearing these non-professional vocalists wrestling with, and working their way through, compositions that drone with a roughly sculpted beauty that’d be inaccessible to more seasoned, veteran performers. You can possibly draw some lines between the use of voice in La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Theatre of Eternal Music, though Prima Materia doesn’t feel quite so reductionist and mainlined as that work; there’s an open breathiness to La Coda Della Tigre that’s completely compelling. Ostensible leader, Roberto Laneri, would go on to release some rather nice solo and collaborative albums over the years, but this is where it all starts. It’s no surprise to discover the label it was released on, Ananda, was co-run by composers Alvin Curran and Giacinto Scelsi.

Dialoghi del Presente

Luciano Cilio
Dialoghi del Presente cover

An undeniably gorgeous album that’s scarred by something more profound, more lonely, Dialoghi Del Presente was the only album released by Luciano Cilio during his short life (he committed suicide at the age of 33). It’s perhaps tempting for some to read a kind of internal ache or existential crisis into the album’s spare, sad compositions, but that doesn’t do justice to the compositional rigour that Cilio brings to the album. Everything here is patiently, intelligently placed; the arrangements give each passage the space needed to blossom. It’s more lyrical than contemporaneous Italian minimalism, and far too understated to fit under any prog rock banner. Silence is the key here, even if that silence is intimated more than realised. You could maybe draw a thread between this and some of the less rigorous compositions from the Wandelweiser universe, though even that’s pushing it. A very singular set of compositions.

Gudrun

Pierrot Lunaire
Gudrun cover

It’s a big call, but Gudrun is perhaps the presiding masterpiece of the Italian underground. Formed in Rome in 1974 by Gaio Chiocchio and Artur Stalteri, they brought Vincenzo Caporaletti into the fold for their self-titled debut from the same year, a sweet, acoustic phase-out of an album. But two years later, with a changed line-up – Caporaletti was out, Welsh soprano Jacqueline Darby was in, Massimo Buzzi guested on drums – Gudrun was an altogether different, far more complex beast. Darby’s presence opens the music up to the operatic, though this is kept in check by the fragmentary nature of the album’s structure; the modular compositions multiply in complexity and intensity, the arrangement and ornamentation is eloquent without overstatement or recourse to blithe signifiers of the ‘progressive’. From the twining tone of harpsichord to the weirdly interplanetary glow of the mellotron, from vaguely Krautrock mantras for guitar and drums to chipped and worn arpeggios for electronics, everything here makes perfect no-sense.

Anima Latina

Lucio Battisti
Anima Latina cover

A successful singer-songwriter who’d achieved pop success and a degree of fame / renown in Italy, Lucio Battisti is, like Franco Battiato, an Italian artisan who seemed equally comfortable with the mainstream and the avant-garde, and like Battiato, he embraced and abandoned both at various points in his career. The difference with Battisti was that he always hung his experiments from his songs, and Anima Latina is one of the best examples of him taking his music out. The slow, sprawling, stumbling opener, “Abbracciala abbracciali abbracciati,” is a good sign of what’s to come – drums mixed high, the voice floating through a misty chill of texture, slowly gathering steam before a funk bass and strident brass ride the song home, with squirming electronics and rangy flute in the sidelines. Battisti’s compositional eloquence and sweet voice cloak the sheer weirdness of the arrangements and approach here – avant-prog via folk song. It’s a delirious mess.