Pearly light blue vinyl edition. 30x30cm insert with extensive liner notes. An origin story, pressed in wax. Before Profondo Rosso. Before Suspiria. Before the name Goblin became synonymous with the sound of Italian horror cinema. There was this.
Amore Libero - Free Love is the first film score ever composed by Fabio Frizzi - written in 1974 when he was just twenty-three, for Pier Ludovico Pavoni's sun-drenched erotic drama of the same name, shot entirely on location in the Seychelles. The film marked the screen debut of Laura Gemser, soon to become an icon of Italian genre cinema through the Black Emanuelle series. The original Cinevox LP has been a genuine holy grail for collectors ever since - pursued, whispered about, almost never found. This Record Store Day 2026 exclusive marks its first ever official vinyl reissue.
What makes the record so extraordinary isn't just its rarity. It's what it documents: the exact moment when a network of young Italian musicians, all orbiting the Cinevox label in Rome, were about to reshape the sound of European cinema. The players here are the future Goblin - Fabio Pignatelli on bass, Massimo Morante on guitar, Walter Martino on drums, Claudio Simonetti on keyboards - performing uncredited as session musicians a full year before their landmark collaboration with Dario Argento on Profondo Rosso. Vince Tempera, who would soon form the legendary Bixio-Frizzi-Tempera trio with Frizzi, handles the arrangements and orchestral direction. Every thread of the most fertile period in Italian soundtrack history is already visible, tangled together in these grooves, waiting to unravel into a dozen different futures.
And the music itself couldn't be further from the creeping dread that would later define both Frizzi and Goblin. Amore Libero is warm, languid, seductive - a tropical exotica score shot through with funky bass lines, shimmering keyboards, and melodic themes that hang in the air like humidity. Tracks like "Ibo Lele" and "Kalu'" pulse with a loose, almost improvisational energy, the rhythm section locked into sinuous grooves while Tempera's arrangements drift between psychedelic colour and Mediterranean lyricism. There's a progressive sensibility at work - the structures breathe, expand, shift - but the overall mood is one of pleasure and discovery rather than complexity for its own sake. You can feel the Seychelles in the music: the heat, the light, the unhurried pace of bodies moving through warm air.
Listening with hindsight, the pre-echoes are unmistakable. The interplay between Morante's guitar and Simonetti's keyboards already hints at the telepathic communication that would explode across Profondo Rosso. Pignatelli's bass lines carry the same dark undertow that would later anchor the most terrifying moments of Zombi 2 and Suspiria. But here, all that latent menace is channeled into something else entirely - a score of genuine sensuality and beauty, composed by a young man at the very start of his journey into sound and image.
