Ugo Busoni

Library music operated by contract: titles that described a setting, tracks short enough to cut and paste, music made fast and under budget. Ugo Busoni's Valvole, originally released in 1975 on the Nuova Idea label, followed those rules on paper - and then proceeded to ignore most of them in practice. Reissued for the first time on vinyl by Musica Per Immagini, in a limited edition of 500 copies with new artwork, it is one of the more genuinely peculiar records to emerge from that world.

The tracklist reads like a synchronization catalogue - "Tokyo", "Raid", "Polvere Cosmica", "Controspionaggio", "Su Una Nuvola" - each title pointing toward a specific mood or scenario. What Busoni does with those prompts, though, is anything but predictable. Far Eastern textures sit alongside folk and rock guitars. Psychedelic rhythms dissolve into avant-garde passages. Cosmic electronics surface unexpectedly, then retreat. "Rullio" - later reissued as a 7" by Soul Jazz, paired with Gerardo Iacoucci's "Violenza" - hit hard enough to earn its own afterlife in breakbeat circles. The record moves between registers so quickly and with such apparent ease that it resists any single description; one of the library collectors' community's own terms for it - "indecipherable" - is more accurate than ironic. Remastered by Giuliano Radiciotti, executive produced by Marco Ferretti and Luigi Giomini.

Forty-plus years on, it still sounds like nothing else.