Across the length of 2019, we’ve had the pleasure of highlighting a near countless number of archival treasures and reissues of long overlooked wonders from the history of recorded music. Among those closest to our hearts, are those connected to the many movements of the Italian musical avant-garde. As the year comes to a close, we feel incredibly lucky to hold yet another of these rare artifacts in our hands - the long awaited reissue of Egisto Macchi’s Fauna Marina, originally issued by Leonardi Records in 1972, returned to the world by Vinyl Magic, in collaboration with the Milan based Edizioni Leonardi. A masterstroke of category defying experimentalism which stands strong against the test of time, this is bound to blow minds.

Egisto Macchi (1928-1992) was one of the great figures in 20th Century Italian sound. Arguably most well known for his membership in the seminal avant-garde collective, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, with Ennio Morricone, Franco Evangelisti, Frederic Rzewski, Roland Kayn, Walter Branchi, and numerous others, like his friend, collaborator, and peer, Morricone, Macchi dedicated a great deal of his creative energy working within the field of film and television, composing over 50 cinema soundtracks, and approximately 1000 for documentaries and television shows, quietly weaving a vast and unique form of sonic radicalism into the popular realm. Macchi’s albums from the 1970’s represent some of the most remarkable and striking recordings, from anywhere, of the era - a stunning expanse of thrilling sound, which most often falls into the territory of Library music - a body of recordings which was generally commissioned and owned by record labels, to be licensed for use within television programs, radio, and film, as stock or background music. Among these, Fauna Marina is among the most stunning we can call to mind, offering quick understanding for why it has remained one of his most sought after titles over the decades, commanding towering prices on the secondary market.

Fauna Marina, like so much library music, is a product of the pure artistic freedom which underscored its creation, existing free from genre and easy categorization. Comprised of eleven compositions intended to accompany the images of a hypothetical fish fauna documentary, from the album’s grooves arises an abstract, hybrid world of sound, bridging the avant-garde approaches to his primary project, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, idioms of western classical music, as well as jazz music, plumbing depths which few ever have, allowing it to feel as fresh and surprising today as the day it was made, without ever losing the wry sense of humor and playfulness - imagistically dancing across the sides with fleeting traces of narrative embedded in its immersive world of texture, rhythm, and tone.

Beautiful, surprising, and challenging, this wonderful, first ever reissue of Egisto Macchi’s masterstroke is unquestionably one of the essential reissues of the year.