Rino De Filippi

Few albums capture Italian library music at its most purposefully conceived as Nel Mondo Del Lavoro. Originally released in 1972 on Sermi - one of the foundational labels of the Italian production music scene, co-founded by Sergio Pagoni and Michelangelo Cunsolo in close orbit with Bruno Nicolai and Ennio Morricone's world - the album was commissioned as the soundtrack to a RAI television documentary series on the petroleum industry, Sapere: Il Petrolio. What Rino De Filippi built from that brief, though, went well beyond functional: twelve tracks whose track titles - "Benessere Industriale", "Ingranaggi", "Fusioni Metalliche", "Calcolatore Elettronico", "Altoforno" - read like a portrait of Italian industrial modernity in sound, each one a precisely crafted scene. Sonor Music Editions' reissue, limited to 800 copies, is its first ever appearance back on vinyl.

The cast assembled here is exceptional by any measure. I Marc 4 - the studio ensemble of Antonello Vannucchi, Carlo Pes, Maurizio Majorana, and Roberto Podio, who had worked alongside Morricone, Nino Rota, and Armando Trovajoli across hundreds of sessions - provide the harmonic and rhythmic core, Vannucchi's Hammond organ anchoring everything with its characteristic warmth. Above them, the vocal ensemble I Cantori Moderni di Alessandro Alessandroni adds scat and texture in configurations that drift between jazz and something more abstracted and rhythmic. The result is music that covers an extraordinary range: bossa nova, lounge, beat, jazz-funk, orchestral mood writing - all unified by De Filippi's restless, collage-like approach to arrangement. Nothing stays still for long.

Also released at the time under the title World At Work on the British Conroy label - a detail that hints at the international appetite that existed for this kind of material. An indispensable record, returned at last.