A landmark, of sorts. Polarlys is the first original release in the catalog of Musica Per Immagini - a label built on excavating the buried archives of Italian library and film music now turning, for the first time, toward the present. The choice of artist is telling. Heinrich Dressel is the alias of Valerio Lombardozzi, a Roman composer and producer who has spent over two decades building one of the most coherent and quietly influential bodies of work in Italian electronic music. Co-founder of MinimalRome - the Roman label that over the years released music by Solvent, Legowelt, Umbuto, and James T Cotton - he draws his primary inspiration from the great film-score composers of the 1970s and '80s: Egisto Macchi, Giorgio Gaslini, Angelo Badalamenti, Goblin, and the broader world of Italian genre cinema that Musica Per Immagini has devoted itself to rescuing from obscurity. The convergence of the two projects is entirely logical.

Polarlys is a soundtrack for a film that does not exist - twelve tracks conceived as the score for an imaginary noir thriller set among the icy waters and fog-wrapped fjords of northern Europe, with Georges Simenon's novel The Mystery of the Polarlys as its literary anchor. The tracklist reads like a cast list and a travelogue: "The Crazy Passenger", "The Death of Rue Delambre", "Cornélius Vriens", "Sternberg's Nephew", "Tromsø", "Hamburg Night", "Else Silberman". Simenon's method - the drowned port, the claustrophobic vessel, the web of minor characters concealing something irreversible - finds a precise sonic equivalent in Lombardozzi's language. Synthesizers accumulate in slow, foreboding formations. Drones settle under the surface like cold water pressure. The opener "The Evil Eye" establishes the mood immediately: maritime menace rendered in analogue warmth, the kind of signal that arrives from deep inside the machine and never quite resolves.

Lombardozzi's signature tool is the Elka Synthex, the legendary Italian synthesizer built in Padua in the early 1980s - and Polarlys uses it to full effect. The instrument's capacity for both glacial sustain and sharp melodic attack maps perfectly onto the moral geography of Simenon's fiction: surfaces that seem still, depths that are not. A debut in the most precise sense - not just of Musica Per Immagini's new direction, but of a sound perfectly matched to its source.