THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,871) Mario Molino and Edda dell’Orso– “T’amo”/”I Love You”
From an “[a]bsolute killer [Italian film] score based on groovy beat and psychedelic cuts” (see #1,469), here is a song that will lull you into a glorious trance. It appears multiple times in the movie, with Edda dell’Orso singing in the featured version and providing “splendid wordless vocals” in the others (see https://www.popsike.com/Mario-Molino-Gli-Angeli-Del-2000-RARE-PSYCH-BEAT-OST-CAM-LIBRARY-LP-/280926957249.html)). The whole score by Mario Molino (see #1,469) is “[m]ad retro futuristic library music… top stuff” (gotofritz, https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/mario-molino/gli-angeli-del-2_000/), a “fantastic soundtrack by one of the most underrated Italian musicians . . . top class Italian sounds for psych beat club dancers, cocktail easy goers and experimental groovers featuring the fabulous vocal talents of Edda dell’Orso”. (Soundohm, https://www.soundohm.com/product/gli-angeli-del-2000)
I haven’t watched the ‘69 flick Gli Angeli del 2000/The Angels of 2000. As to the the film, Soundohm tells us that it “is a 1969 flick directed by Honil Ranieri that has all the drug, sex and counter culture ingredients of the era but which had very small distribution when first released – it was probably better distributed its photonovel version rather than the film itself! . . . The music is amazing”. (https://www.soundohm.com/product/gli-angeli-del-2000)
Estudiodelsonidoesnob/soundstudiosnob describes the movie thusly (courtesy of Google Translate):
[A]nother . . . of the countless examples in which the music that illustrates the images for which it was conceived is infinitely superior to what is illustrated. . . . [The] story [is] of Marco, a drug dealer and addict obsessed with the memory of Valeria, his girlfriend, who died in front of him in a tragic accident. Marco maintains a kind of idyll with Angela, a student who lives in an apartment building near his flat and with whom he intends to replace the painful memory of Valeria. Disgusted with his life and his circumstances, he reluctantly participates in a gang war that seems to open his eyes and redeem him. Once he has achieved the feat, waiting for Angela and partly overcoming his traumas, while crossing the street to meet her, he is now the one who is run over, dying in front of her and thus preventing her from starting over.
https://estudiodelsonidoesnob.wordpress.com/category/mario-molino/
As to Mario Molino, Forced Exposure says:
Although much about [Italian composer, musician, and guitarist Mario Molino] remains unknown to this day, [he] was a prominent figure in the world [of] library music, celebrated for his genre-spanning versatility. On one hand, he was a virtuoso classical guitarist, while on the other, he had a strong foundation in jazz and contemporary music. This duality, spanning from classical guitar solos to spaced out psychedelic rock with fuzzed guitars, eccentric funk-infused Hammond organ grooves, proto-hip hop, and orchestral compositions, is reflected in his discography.
As to Edda dell’Orso, the King of Fuh writes;
Since the mid-1960s, Edda Dell’Orso has provided haunting wordless vocals to a large number of film scores by Ennio Morricone [see #1,737] and other prominent, mostly Italian composers of those times; Piero Piccioni, Bruno Nicolai, Roberto Pregadio and Luis Bacalov. But her name is synonymous with Morricone and in particular, the soundtracks of the original spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, such as A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and Once Upon A Time In The West, where her dramatic voice was deployed as an instrument for the first time and to revolutionary effect. The singer’s sensuous and often playful vocals help provide tense atmospheres and dreamy moods to these soundtracks, as well as to the scores for Leone’s A Fistful Of Dynamite, composer Piccioni’s lovely music for the film Scacco Alla Regina, and Spanish composer Anton Garcia Abril’s strange but highly effective score for the offbeat 1967 sci-fi drama 4-3-2-1 Morte!, that with Edda’s assistance somehow successfully helps blend an atonal chamber orchestra with a go-go beat and cartoon jazz. In the 1970s, Edda contributed to two films by Italian shock horror director Dario Argento, including L’uccello Dalle Plume di Cristallo (The Bird With Crystal Plumage), and then in 1976 collaborated with the Italian progressive instrumental group Goblin (often used by Argento as well) for Perche Si Uccidono?“(Why Do They Kill Themselves), a film essay about drugs and self-destruction. She continues to perform and lives today in Italy with her husband, conductor and composer Giacomo Dell’Orso. Their last name translates to “of the bear”.
Wikipedia (courtesy of Google Translate)) adds:
Originally from Genoa, [Edda Sabatini] moved to Rome with her family; she graduated in 1956 in singing and piano at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome, and began his career as a chorister in Franco Potenza’s choral group. In 1958 she married Giacomo dell’Orso, whom she had met at the Academy in 1952 and with whom she had a son and a daughter; after two years she joined [Alessandro] Alessandroni’s [see #815] “Cantori Moderni”, where she had the opportunity to participate in the recording of many 45s by artists of RCA Italiana. It was during these recordings, where Ennio Morricone was often present as arranger, that the maestro noticed Dell’Orso’s soprano voice, with a range of three octaves, and decided to entrust her with solo parts in the creation of some soundtracks, among which the most famous of this period were The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in 1966 and Once Upon a Time in the West in 1968, both by Sergio Leone. While continuing to sing in . . . Alessandroni’s vocal group , Edda Dell’Orso began a solo career . . . . 1971 is the year of Duck, You Sucker!, and it is the moment when her singing voice . . . enters the history of film music. . . . In 1972, as a soloist, still within the context of . . . I cantori moderni . . . she recorded the soundtrack of the successful drama A come Andromeda, composed and directed by Mario Migliardi. [see #1,586]
Finn Cohen talks about the resurgence of interest in Italian library music:
“[L]ibrary” music — obscure vinyl records containing songs written directly for radio, television or ad placement, in this case the lush, string-laden, funk- and jazz-informed arrangements of classically trained Italian composers. “There was no interest in this stuff when I started,” [says Lorenzo] Fabrizi[, who has] run the reissue label Sonor Music Editions since 2013. “They had pressed 200, 300, 500, 1,000 copies, but they were not destined for shops or distributors. They were only given to internal circles of music supervisors, journalists and people who worked in television.” Sonor is one of several labels in the last few decades that have resurrected Italian classics from the European library genre . . . . From the 1960s well into the 1980s, there was a lot of money to be made in themes: TV and radio producers needed music to accompany opening credits, action or love scenes, game show sequences or advertising. Well-trained composers had access to large ensembles and budgets, and the Italians in particular swung for the fences. . . . “They had a lot more latitude because they weren’t making this music for a particular audience,” [says producer and composer Adrian Younge]. “So if they needed something dramatic, they could just do the craziest [expletive] and wouldn’t have to deal with somebody saying, ‘It’s not pop enough.’” Because it had no commercial life, the output of many talented composers lay hidden for years. But in the late 1990s, labels like Easy Tempo started reissuing soundtracks and compilations of the Italian works. . . . “Unapologetically Black music came into the forefront for cinema in the late ’50s through the early ’70s; European composers, Italian composers took this sound and synthesized it with their classical teachings,” Younge said. “And that created a palette of music that inspired hip-hop producers generations later that were trying to find the coolest samples. It became a treasure trove for many of us.” For the character-based narratives of hip-hop, a genre built on finding loops from records few had heard, these compositions were practically begging to be mined. . . . Once the word got out about the Italians, a collectors’ arms race was on.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/arts/music/italian-library-music-sven-wunder.html
You can watch Gli Angeli del 2000 (in Italian) on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLR-HRKIqfI.
Here is a wordless version:
Here is another version:
Here is yet another version:
Here is a cool version with trumpet:
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