Widely celebrated and easily among the most ambitious and beautiful endeavors of the last year, Dialogo’s "Dimensioni Sonore" box - the first ever reissue of one of the great holy grails of Italian Library music by Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai - is a truly stunning thing to behold.

Almost entirely distinct in scale and content, Dimensioni Sonore - originally issued by RCA in 1972 - towers in the history of library music, gathering 103 works by two of the most important figures in 20th century Italian music, Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai, offering 5 LPs of material to each.

Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai each forged distinct and unexpected creative paths that were entirely tuned to the eras through which they worked; radical and forward-thinking composers, who activated vast new worlds of possibility via the mediums of film and television. Morricone has long held legendary status for his soundtrack and library music work, as well as his explicitly avant-garde and experimental endeavours within the seminal collective, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, but Dimensioni Sonore holds equal distinction as a historically prescient illumination into the slightly lesser-known efforts of Nicolai, and the groundbreaking importance of his work.

Regular collaborators over the course of their respective careers, Morricone and Nicolai met as students during the early 1950s at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome, fostering a friendship that would yield, from the mid 1960s on, hundreds of albums that bear both of their names.

Each of these is incredible and worthy of note, but none is as astounding, distinct, or ambitious as Dimensioni Sonore - issued as a series of 10 individual LPs, and as a deluxe box set comprising them all - regarded by many as the crown jewel in RCA’s legendary library music series, Catalogo di Musiche per Sonorizzazioni.

Deploying a startling range of acoustic and electronic instrumentation and techniques, and conceived in sequential order, across the 10 LPs Morricone and Nicolai - working far more like avant-garde composers than the creators of film scores - set out to create a body of expressive and dynamic work which explored constant timbric exploitations and multiform musical parameters, and their possibilities for utilization, titling each composition with no direct relation to its form, intentionally leaving the meaning entirely to the listener’s mind.

Sheets of pointillistic ambience bristle with details of synthetic and organic tones and textures, generating fields of abstraction that could be mistaken for any number of avant-garde and experimental gestures of the '60s and '70s, were it not for the unifying, cracking rhythm section that drives it forward and pushes into entirely unexpected realms, which gave Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elio Petri, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Giuliano Montaldo plenty to explore in their original liner notes for the release.

A true genre defying marvel, Dialogo’s repress of their first ever vinyl reissue of Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai’s masterstroke, Dimensioni Sonore, comes in a super deluxe fabric-woven box-set with 10 LPs on red vinyl + 10 CDs, reproducing the original liner notes by the incredible cast mentioned above.