In 1960, when Armando Trovajoli composed the soundtrack for Anton Giulio Majano's horror film Seddok, L'Erede Di Satana (known internationally as Atom Age Vampire and Lycanthropus), the landscape of electronic music was still in its infancy. The Moog synthesizer wouldn't reach commercial availability until 1964. Wendy Carlos' groundbreaking Switched-On Bach was still eight years away. Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, and the entire krautrock movement lay a decade in the future. Yet here was Trovajoli, already integrating electronic atmospheres into his symphonic horror compositions.

This was true pioneering work. While electronic music research was happening in academic studios - the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in London, the Studio di Fonologia Musicale in Milan - Trovajoli was among the first Italian composers to bring these experimental sounds into commercial cinema. His approach to Seddok demonstrates the forward-thinking sensibility that would define Italian film music's relationship with electronics throughout the 1960s and 70s.

The maestro's score for this gothic tale of disfigurement, obsession, and transformation brilliantly marries two worlds: the symphonic tradition of European cinema and the unsettling potential of electronic sound. Trovajoli crafts compositions "full of tension and mystery," using orchestral arrangements to convey the romantic tragedy at the film's core, while enriching these passages with electronic atmospheres that suggest something unnatural, something born of radiation and science gone wrong—perfectly capturing the "Atom Age" anxiety of the era. This duality reflects the film's narrative itself: Professor Levin's experiments with radiation-derived serums, the transformation of beauty into monstrosity, the intersection of traditional medicine with atomic-age science. Trovajoli's electronic textures evoke the laboratory, the experimental, the dangerous frontier where humanity meets its own technological hubris. These are not merely sound effects but integral musical elements that create an atmosphere of scientific horror years before such approaches became commonplace.

Yet Trovajoli never abandons his jazz roots. True to his background—he had performed at the Paris Jazz Festival in 1949 and conducted the RAI Orchestra—the score also features those "jazzy-lounge themes in the typical Trovajoli style" that ground the film's Parisian setting. This fusion of jazz sophistication, symphonic drama, and electronic experimentation places Seddok at a crucial intersection in film music history.

Context matters here. In 1960, Italian cinema was entering its golden age of genre filmmaking. Mario Bava would release Black Sunday that same year, launching the Gothic horror boom. The giallo genre was gestating. Library music—with its experimental freedom—was beginning to flourish. Trovajoli's work on Seddok helped establish the sonic vocabulary that would define Italian horror and thriller soundtracks for the next two decades: the marriage of orchestral grandeur with electronic unease, of jazz cool with avant-garde experimentation.

By 1971, Italian composers like Gianni Mazza would be creating fully electronic library music, and by the mid-70s, Goblin's synthesizer-driven scores would revolutionize horror soundtracks worldwide. But Trovajoli was there first, in 1960, exploring electronic atmospheres when most film composers still relied exclusively on traditional orchestration. His pioneering spirit on Seddok demonstrates that Italian cinema's legendary relationship with electronic music didn't emerge fully formed in the 1970s—it was built by innovators like Trovajoli who saw the potential of these new sounds more than a decade earlier. For collectors of Italian cinema soundtracks, for admirers of early electronic music, for anyone interested in the genesis of horror film scoring, Seddok, L'Erede Di Satana stands as essential listening: a document of a master composer pushing boundaries, embracing new technologies, and helping to write the future of film music.