**300 copies** By the time the 1980s rolled around, most of the old guard had either hung up their saxophones or sold their souls to the synthesizer in ways that made you want to weep into your Campari. Not Sandro Brugnolini. The man who'd spent the late '50s channeling Miles Davis through the smoke-filled clubs of Rome with the Modern Jazz Gang, who'd scored jungle goddesses and naked panthers for Ruggero Deodato, who'd descended into the psych-fuzz inferno of Underground and Overground when the decade turned — this man didn't retire. He simply plugged in different machines.

Abstract Forms catches Brugnolini at the tail end of Italian library music's golden age, somewhere between 1988 and 1992, alone in a studio with a rack of digital synthesizers and absolutely nothing to prove to anyone. These sixteen tracks were destined for television — background music, synchronization fodder, the kind of thing that plays under news segments about stock markets or behind the opening credits of late-night thrillers you half-remember from childhood fevers. But here's the thing: Brugnolini never learned how to phone it in.

What you get instead is the work of a jazz cat who'd spent three decades absorbing every technological shift the industry threw at him and decided, at sixty-something, to paint with electrons. Four tracks are dedicated to Kandinsky — WhitBian, BlackNer, BlueGial, GreenRos — as if the Russian abstractionist had been reborn in a Roman dubbing studio, his color theories translated into MIDI data and FM synthesis. There's Vapor Killer, which sounds exactly like its name suggests. There's Omen Nemo, palindrome noir. There's I Remember Sax, which is either a confession or a joke or both.

The digital keyboards here don't have that cheesy, tinny quality of '80s Eurotrash. This is something stranger — smooth jazz memoirs filtered through machines, videogame atmospheres overplayed on thriller sequences, the sound of a man who understood that technology is just another instrument, and instruments are just tools for making you feel something you didn't know you could feel.

Brugnolini died in December 2020, ten days after his 89th birthday, having composed music for over six decades. These recordings, never before released on vinyl, are among the last secrets he left behind.