Rome’s Nature/Pigna Records are the leading exponents of ‘Roman funk’ – Italian house music influenced by the Italo-disco sound…
Flick through any dance music mag right now and you’re guaranteed to come across a mention of Italo-disco. Browse through the racks down at your local record emporium and you’re equally likely to come across an Italian production shot through with not a little bit of “la dolce vita”.
The Italo style – think motoric pre-house beats, melodic analogue synths, arpeggiated basslines and heavily vocodered vocals which veer close to campness – has made something of a clubland resurgence of late, and its influence runs through European house productions like the name of seaside towns does through sticks of rock.
This unmistakably retro sound is nowhere more apparent than in the Roman Funk of Francesco De Bellis (AKA Francisco) and his Pigna Records cohorts Marco Passarani and Mario Pierro.
After a series of funk and Italo-heavy singles “Moon Roller”, “Esplanade 97”, “Fregna (The Age)” which have caused quite a stir amongst fans of modern electro-house, he’s about to release his debut album ‘Music Business’ on Nature.
As well as this, the three of them have together made an album that borrows heavily from their country’s mutant electronic strain of disco. “After 20 years people are finding new sounds from another time,” Francisco explains. “The Italo-disco is a good alternative. It’s fresh, like a new style.”
Having formed Nature Records in the mid-’90s, this trio of like-minded Detroit techno, street dance and Chicago heads Passarani, Pierro and Francesco have been working together collectively for over ten years, be it as Mat101 and Jolly Music (Marco and Francesco’s former incarnations) or on Nature’s baby brother label Pigna.
“The Pigna sound is a super combination of our own differences,” Passarani tells us of their label. It’s only now, however, that they’ve made a record that perfectly encapsulates the Pigna modus operandi. Pigna People’s ‘Let ’Em Talk’ LP, is arguably the most exciting house album to come from Italy in some time. As sexy and cosmic as it is punchy and jackin’, it’s proof that Italy’s alternative club scene is a million miles away from the insipid progressive and tribal house it had become synonymous with.
“Like the label, we did it because we couldn’t find anything that sounded like the music we wanted to hear on the ’floor,” Mario says of the Pigna sound. “We tried to accept the rules of the dancefloor and not make any compromises.”
“You can feel the Italo-disco influences in our music, as well as many other things,” continues Passarani. “We’re from Rome and this dramatic, atmospheric style is always showing up! It’s in our DNA.”
“Disco music has always had a big influence in Italy,” adds Mario. “Italians have this long history of melody and making harmonies out of things.”
They’re not the only ones looking to the past for creative inspiration. There’s a new wave of Italian producers like Franz & Shape, Ajello, Mogdax, Donato Dozzy, Fabrizio Mammarella, Cosmo and Guglielmo Mascio, most of whom are also Roman, making groovy, Italo-esque electronic house: tracks by both Franz & Shape and Ajello got recognition outside of Italy when tracks appeared on the ‘Italian EP’ on Relish last year, and a second EP, this time featuring Mammarella, is on the way at the end of the year.
Vicenza-based duo Mogdax have released a couple of EPs (‘Made In Italo’ and ‘Jack Ibiza’) of pitched down, Metro Area-esque house and spacey disco, and are working alongside Nu Funk Klan’s Mascio on his debut production outings.
So where does this fascination come from? “For me, this music is fun and the analogic sound is important to me,” Francesco says. “To me it’s a cheaper version of the American disco,” adds Passarani. “In Italy it’s seen as b-series music and is viewed as very cheesy and commercial, which is how a lot of Italo was in the ’80s. But after all these years we have slowly found that there were a lot of producers back then doing really good quality, innovative stuff.”
It was a music born as much as anything of restrictions, as Italian producers tried to ape the big Philly disco records – often produced with full orchestras for vast sums of money – on cheap home studio set-ups with polyphonic synthesisers and drum machines.
“That’s why a lot of it sounds so fresh, because somebody was trying to take those machines to the level of complexity of the Americans,” says Mario. “It’s a very early kind of house music. They were using the same electronic instruments as early house and techno producers, but with disco influences,” Marco continues.
Unlike their US counterparts, these pioneering Italian producers are much less recognised. Daniele Baldelli, Claudio Simonetti, Maurizio Dami (AKA electro legend Alexander Robotnick), Stefano Pulga, A Zanni and Celso Valli, as well as production outfits Kasso, Gaz Nevada, Steel Mind, Kano, Jago, Charlie, Scotch, Capricorn, Koto and Gazebo, amongst others, are only today getting the recognition they deserve, not least from UK producers and Italo revivalists Crème Organisation and Clone from The Netherlands.
Indeed, early house clubs like Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles’ Music Box in Chicago played a lot of Italo-disco, the infamous Hot Mix 5 label borrowed from its harmonic style and even in Italy when house first made its mark in the early ’90s, producers would take old Italo tracks and lay 909 drum beats over them.
“Dance music now must be about the song,” says Francesco of today’s cutting-edge house music. “It’s not about simple tools for DJs anymore.“Italo is like this because it was not a tool. It was a song with a big melody for fun and dancing and partying.”
It’s true – Italians do do it better!
IDJ magazine – Issue 67 / November 2005
Copied from the IDJ website – IDJ magazine, United Kingdom.
