A ghost surfaced in Italian record shop windows in 1978, bearing a single unexplained name and then dissolving back into the dark it had spent forty minutes describing. Midnight In Space is one of the great unsolved riddles of late-1970s Italian electronics. It arrived on PDU, the label founded by the pop singer Mina, an imprint better known to most for glossy chart records but cherished by collectors for two other reasons: its Italian pressings of the German Cosmic Courier clan, and a small run of indigenous electronic albums that sat utterly apart from anything else in the catalogue. Midnight In Space was the third of these, following Andrea Centazzo's Electronic Mind Waves (issued under the Elektriktus name) and Roberto Cacciapaglia's Sonanze. Who actually made it has never been established. The record was widely taken for a German production, an impression the label seems to have encouraged, but the consensus among those who have lived with it points firmly back to Italy, to the orbit of library and soundtrack musicians. Names get floated - Stelvio Cipriani chief among them - and none stick. Hydrus remains a name attached to nobody.

What it sounds like is easier to describe than to place. Synthesizers and organ carry the weight, threaded through with electric piano that falls in slow droplets, while wordless female voices drift across the surface with the warm, weightless quality Italians of the era reserved for the likes of Edda Dell'Orso. There is a pulse here too, an unhurried disco undertow that surfaces and recedes, keeping the music tethered to the body even as it points upward. At one moment the players reach for the five-note phrase of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and quote only the first three, a small joke that says a great deal about the record's relationship to the science-fiction imagination it floats within.

That tension is the whole point. Midnight In Space belongs to no clean lineage. It is too song-shaped for the cosmic underground, too strange and interior for the lounge, too sincere for camp and too playful for solemnity. It listens, in passing, like Italian library music dreaming of the kosmische records PDU itself was importing from Ohr, and arriving somewhere neither tradition had thought to go. The six pieces, from the title track through Hibernation, Earth Calling Space, Milky Way, The 2 Planets and Space Link-up, function less as compositions than as rooms in a single drifting structure, each one cool, spacious, and quietly suspended.

Long a holy grail for collectors of Italian electronics, never reissued on CD and absent from most histories that should have claimed it, Midnight In Space is one of those records that rewards being approached entirely on its own terms. Reissued by Wah Wah Records in a limited vinyl edition of 500 copies, faithful to the 1978 original. A missing piece of the puzzle, returned from the place it disappeared into.

"Wonderful space electronic LP released by PDU label. Forget that kitch disco label.What we have here is space electronics in the traition of Ohr and Kosmische Kuriere albums, that were released in Italy by PDU label too. Not much more infos available though." Mutant Sound