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Italy

Bologna, spoken word, post-rock

Massimo Volume

Emidio Clementi narrates more than he sings, in a style called recitativo: literary spoken-word laid over the post-rock that Massimo Volume built as a trio in Bologna. When the band formed there in the early 1990s, alongside CSI and Afterhours, it was a new approach in Italian rock. Lungo i bordi (1995) got them a major-label deal, which was rare for an indie act from that scene. Clementi's lyrics kept leaning on literature. One of his touchstones was Emanuel Carnevali, an Italian-American poet who edited Poetry magazine in Chicago and was friends with Ezra Pound, then came back to Bologna gravely ill and died there in 1942. Decades later Clementi found his poems in the same city.

Turin — a few self-dubbed cassettes

Novostj

Novostj barely exists on paper. It was an early-1980s Turin project built around Marco Milanesio of the DIY tape label HAX, who worked with vocalist Roberta Ongaro while the city went through its long industrial decline. What it left behind is little more than a run of self-dubbed cassettes and a 1987 split single with the UK's Legendary Pink Dots. That scattered archive was compiled in 1988, in a pressing of just a few handmade copies, and rediscovered decades later when reissue labels in California and the UK tracked the tapes down.

Milan, 1974 — cabaret meets synth

Maria Monti

Before she made Il Bestiario (1974), Maria Monti had already sung in Milan's cabarets, competed at Sanremo, and acted for Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci. The record is an avant-garde song cycle that puts her voice up against an early synthesizer, the jazz soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, and lyrics by the poet Aldo Braibanti. It stayed rare and mostly forgotten for decades, until the American reissue label Unseen Worlds put it back in print in the 2010s.

Lute and hurdy-gurdy, 1970s rock

Angelo Branduardi

Angelo Branduardi trained classically on violin in Genoa, then built his sound from Renaissance and Baroque folk instruments (hurdy-gurdy, dulcimer, lute) set against rock arrangements. Reworking centuries-old melodies for a 1970s audience made him one of the decade's less likely Italian hitmakers. It also gave him a long career, built mostly on that same instinct.

A French chansonnier, in Italian

Léo Ferré

Léo Ferré is remembered as one of France's essential postwar songwriters, but his ties to Italy went further than translation. His mother's family came from Piedmont. As a boy he was sent to a Catholic boarding school just over the Italian border, and from 1971 until his death in 1993 he lived in Castellina in Chianti, in Tuscany. He even recorded in Italian for that adopted audience, on Leo Ferré in Italiano, the chansonnier singing for once in his second country's own language.

A Colombian voice, an Italian studio

Ramirez

Ramirez was a studio alias and never a touring band. Italian producers Davide Rizzatti, Elvio Moratto, and Riccardo Persi, working out of Italy's DFC Records, built it around Colombian-born vocalist Alex Quiroz-Buelvas, who sang in Spanish. It was the same formula behind the wave of Italo-dance records exported across Europe in the early '90s. From 1992 their records were quickly licensed to labels in Germany, Belgium, and France, and they became fixtures of club nights from Ibiza to Tenerife.

The Collection