I've done it folks! I made a whole new page especially devoted to Italo disco, called I Like Italot and you can find it right here. In the following weeks and months I will link the Italo tracks that I've posted before on this blog to the article and add new ones. The final goal is to create a kind of database. I hope you enjoy it and make it the start of a new italo habit.

I Like Italotrix

FZ once told to a fine specimen of his most beloved creature on earth (a journalist) that progress is not possible in society without policies that leave room for any kind of deviation of the norm. Freaks are the natural way of things. Take for instance this dude on Stones Throw. I leave it in the middle wether this guy's just crazy or a bloody genius.



Third and final part...

I like italoto

This is part 2. Going through my cassettes I found an old favourite of mine that I forgot about. Shame on me. Andreas Dorau is a really great… guy. Swell, I bought this album on cassette a couple of years after its release (1994) on a flea market. It said Neu! So I thought it was an album by the Krautrock band Neu! - the cover should have warned me that it couldn’t have been an album by Neu!, then again they print it so small to fit on a cassette cover – but I was mistaken. Instead it was a nice pop album by Andreas Dorau and this song really got stuck in my head for weeks back then. Now, it bugging me again :-)

Andreas Dorau – Und das Telefon sagt Du 1994

Jeder kennt doch diesen Ton
Die Post schickt ihn durch's Telefon
Dieses Zeichen nennt man frei
Und so fühl ich mich dabei
Warum in die Ferne schweifen
Ich muß nur zum Hörer greifen
Ich heb ab und frage wer ist dieser nette junge Herr?

Refrain:
Und das Telefon sagt Du
Und ich hör ihm weiter zu
Und es sagt nur immer Du , Du

Ich denk nicht immer nur an mich
Sondern gerne auch an Dich
Ich nehm den Hörer und frag schlau
Wer gefällt heut jeder Frau?

Dieseswunderschöne Uuuh
Was für mich klingt wie nur Du
Ich heb ab und bin ganz still
Weil ich's nochmal hören will

I found me a decent version of Pas De Deux’s Rendez-Vous in a big band version just as on the Eurovision song contest and what better moment to share this than right now. Oh yeah, Sébastien Tellier didn’t make a lasting impression apparently. He sort of finished 19th which is still one of the best result for France over the last years so it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

Pas De Deux – Rendez-Vous (big band version) 1983

I'm thinking about making an new page for this article and to collect all Italo disco and add the links in that new page.

1978-1981

In late 1978, Black Devil, at the time a very obscure act from France, releases the Disco Club LP, which is now considered one of the greatest electronic pleasures of the late 70's. Beautiful harmonies working solely with a synthesizer in real-time recording sessions make this album still in demand today! (see the post about the more recent re-release on labels like WARP where some people even thought that it was an Aphex Twin/Luke Vibert collaboration instead of an old disco classic).
Disco Fizz by Azoto (working without the Lucrethia syntax) appeared in 1980, alongside Tantra's The Hills Of Katmandu release. Both artists being Italian and leaning further away from the traditional disco beat and more towards a faster drumbeat using a drum machine, would later be known as two more pioneers of what would become Italo Disco. At the same time, on the newly formed Discomagic Records label, Sylvi Foster created Love Dawn and If You Are Master while Delanua makes a masterpiece called Flood - these songs being considered to this day the first true Italo Disco songs.
Kano begins his long career with songs such as I'm Ready and Holly Dolly. In 1980, La Bionda would solidify their position as a major influence of Italo Disco music with their big hit entitled, I Wanna Be Your Lover.

1982

The Italo Disco scene was well under way by the time 1982 rolled in. Discomagic Records and Il Discotto Productions had both surfaced at this point and had started spawning off many sub-labels, each with their own distinguishable sounds.
On Il Discotto, Jo Jo created the masterpiece track entitled Mind Games, which fused R&B, electro, and disco all into one song, and Gary Low released his first single You Are A Danger which took a synthesizer and piano and welded them together into one song.
On the other end of the spectrum, Discomagic was beginning a long catalogue of records. The first big ones seemed to be How Many Fill by Delanua, The Garden and Robot Is Systematic by 'Lectric Workers, and the club smash, Hookey by Sylvi Foster.
ll Discotto Productions has a huge hit with Tequila by Bo Boss.
I Need Love by Capricorn is released and considered a major accomplishment in electro dance. Plastic Doll by Dharma and on Zanza Records, Klein & M.B.O.’s release Dirty Talk become cult classics way ahead of their time!
Pink Project debuts with Disco Project a cover version of Pink Floyd's Another Brick In The Wall. Dirty Talk and Disco project become two of the biggest chart hits in Europe in all of 1982.
Also released in '82 on Zanza Records was Droid by Mito, a song and artist that has developed quite a following since then. Koto, who would go on to become one of the most famous Italo artists ever, debuts with Chinese Revenge, a very spacey disco song. Bob Salton's Starknight becomes a high energy Italo Disco hit. Coda by Amin Peck starts a long list of hits for this man. The Twins debut with Face To Face - Heart To Heart and would be back in 1983 with two more big singles.
The big accomplishment in blending electro with Italo Disco in 1982 would have to be Bad Passion by Steel Mind. Using male, female, and robot vocals all in one song, we hear what is more like a prelude to all future dance music. We won't stress it any further, but this is to be considered one of the fundamental songs of Italo Disco!
Marzio Dance debuts with some promising hits such as The Adventure and the early 1983 follow up release entitled, Rap-O-Hush. One of the most respectable songs of 1982 is Life With You by Expansives, a project by Franco Rago and Giorgio Farina who also produced The Man From Colours by Wanexa, all releases by the aforementioned 'Lectric Workers, and also Batida by Cariocas, which hit the market in the end of 1982.

1983

1983 is without a doubt the best year for Italo Disco music from a true Italo lover's point of view!

I like Italot?!

I was ready this evening to go to a concert of Santogold, here in Antwerp at Trix, but it was cancelled because she has problems with her voice. No voice, no concert. Makes sense. So, that leaves me with some extra time to kill and I decided to roast that little piggy right here at this page.
I had some unfinished business to attend to from the last time. I had planned to make it my last post on Italo disco, at least for a certain while that is, but things turned out differently. I found some interesting written information from various sources on the net about Italo disco and its history and I decided to edit it as an article and insert links to the songs that got mentioned in it. This took me quite a while, too long to add it to the last post. That’s why I’m posting the first bits of it tonight. As time goes by I will add more links but please don’t get to crazy or overexcited right now, because I guess about 20% of the tracks mentioned, will stay without a link. There’s some pretty obscure stuff out there that’s really hard to find. Every once in a while I find such a lost treasure like Fokewulf 190 which is one the holy grails of Italo but you can’t win them all.
The tracks by Fokewulf 190, named after an old airplane, I own are off course not the originals. I’m not that insane (yet) thank you, to pay hundreds of euro’s on ebay to buy those obscure singles (only 400 hundred or so made in 1984). I'm quite happy with a legal download, even if it means that I can’t play them at a party because the mp3 and wav files you can download are still not made for such purposes, which is a pity.

In the next weeks I'll be switching over to other stuff that I like. I noticed that the brasil page has not been updated in a long while, so expect some more brasilian music from the past and the present.

Lalala coming soon…

So here it goes...

Now, what’s Italo? This is a brief outline I edited from a online source that I unfortunately can’t track back

1
Italo disco is a very wide term that refers to various types of European disco and pop-styled electronic dance music, that evolved during the early 1980s in Italy, Germany, Spain and other parts of Europe but mainly Italy and Germany.

2
Italo disco music has a distinct, futuristic and spacey sound which is the result of the dominant use of synthesizers, drum machines and vocoders.

3
During the 1980s, the term Italo-disco was coined in Europe to describe all the non UK-based dance productions, including some Canadian ones (that explains my interest for Canadian disco like for instance Kebekelektrik on this page).
In the UK and the USA, Italo-disco was virtually unknown to the mainstream consumer and existed only underground, except for some later Italian eurobeat productions and very few German hits.

4
The name Italo disco originates from the Italo Boot Mix series - a megamix featuring Italian and German produced disco music - created in 1983 by Bernhard Mikulski, the founder of German-based ZYX Music.
Prior to 1983, the genre was simply referred to as 'disco music' or 'dance music' from Europe, Eurodisco that is. The presenters of the Italian music show Discoring (produced by RAI), usually referred to the Italian productions of what later would became Italo Disco as Rock Electronico and Bailandi Discoteka (disco dance).

5
This first version of Italo Disco sounded like a down tempo version of Space or Cosmic Disco, a short lived Eurodisco instrumental style with futuristic sound effects and lyrics heavily influenced by David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars band and which the Italian DJ Daniele Baldelli made famous in the legendary club Cosmic.

6
Technically speaking, Italo Disco was simply the 80s version of Eurodisco. Today, the term 'Euro Disco' refers to all disco music produced in Europe during the 70s and 80s. But during the 1980s this term was used to describe the 1970s and early 1980s European disco productions, especially those from Germany (Boney M, Eruption, Dschinghis Khan, etc). In the mid 80s, the Stock Aitken & Waterman team created a commercial music genre in the UK labelled as Eurobeat. Those first hits (Dead or Alive, Bananarama, Jason Donovan, Sonia, Kylie Minogue, etc) were heavily based on how Italo Disco sounded to the British public. Once arriving in the USA, Eurobeat helped the evolution of New York's Freestyle. In the USA, Eurobeat was then marketed as Hi-NRG.

7
The term Eurobeat was also used in Japan (around 1987) to describe all Italo Disco and Eurobeat imports. Italo Disco became very successful in Japan and when 80s Eurodisco ended and the music switched to Eurohouse and New Beat, Super Eurobeat saw the light and was especially produced for the Japanese market, as a kind of Japanese successor of Italo Disco (called Eurobeat by Japanese fans). These Super Eurobeat productions frequently had meaningless and sometimes incomprehensible lyrics. During the 90s, another spinoff successor appeared called Eurobeat Flash. Both Super Eurobeat and Eurobeat Flash are virtually unknown outside Japan.

8
During the 90s, disco Polo created in Poland was heavily based on the Italo Disco sound. Italo-Disco (in the German variation of Dieter Bohlen) also continued until the early 00s in Russia.

9
On early Italo disco productions, the vocals were usually in English, performed by non-native English speaking singers. After 1985, other European languages became common, especially Italian, French, Spanish and even Greek. At the same time, most of the German-produced Italo disco hits had both English and German-speaking versions.

10
The German variation of Italo disco, very popular during the 80s, was danced in the so-called discofox style. In the German Speaking European countries, this variation of Italo disco mixed on the dancefloors with the German Schlager style, that around 1988 started to sound very close to the German variation of Italo disco. About that time, older Germans, Austrians and Swiss, started calling both Schlager and the German Italo Disco hits Discofox, because they used to dance them both with the same discofox style. The German variation of Italo Disco, took the nick-name Discofox since then. For the rest of Europe, the term discofox for the German variation of italo-disco, never existed.

The History Of Italo Disco from and another source which is the myspace site of a great Italo disco radio.

1975-1977

Emerging from Val Gardena, Italy, producer and keyboard player Mr. Giorgio Moroder began to experiment on a new toy in the music world: an electronic synthesizer. He started to create loops and synth-hooks using basic equipment from Moog and Korg. His first LP From Here To Eternity, The Chase and the rest of the score for the 1978 film Midnight Express established him as a popular hitmaker and left a permanent mark in the ears of young Italians who would later go on to create their own electronic music, eventually to be known as 'Italo Disco'.
These Italian producers were also influenced by film soundtracks that used new electronic sounds. Just 2 years earlier in 1976, of John Carpenter started his illustrious career as a moviemaker and composer of electronic music using excessive use of droids and drum machines. The original motion picture soundtrack to Assault On Precinct 13 would go on to become a major influence for many Italians who discovered the power of a drum machine, as heard in the opening theme of the movie.
Around the same time, an Italian band by the name of Goblin emerged and began creating electronic-themed soundtracks for all of Dario Argento's Italian horror films, setting up another major influence for early Italo Disco artists. Some of the more memorable and early scores were for the movies Deep Red and Suspiria (1976 and 1978, respectively). Goblin's scores and Argento's style would cause many other Italian movie directors to use electronic elements in their Giallo and horror-styled films - thus starting a new era for electronic music (the first being disco several years earlier). Eventually the dark sound of these scores would fuse with disco music and we'd reach Italo Disco.

But first...

1977-78

... Giorgio Moroder's first full LP was released. From Here To Eternity, featuring the self-titled first single that became an instant success, was what started everything! This would go down as a pioneer album that would forever change electronic music.
Less than a year later, Chase was released, becoming Giorgio's biggest hit ever, once again strenghtening his appeal as a leader in the electronic department.
Nearly simultaneously, Italian producer, Jean-Marc Cerrone released a series of albums - the most famous being, Supernature and Love In C Minor. Simply outstanding works using a synthesizer would make Mr. Cerrone, a native of France become another major influence for all Italo Disco music to follow.

Soon after Moroder and Cerrone hit the airwaves, the rest was history. Lucrethia & The Azoto 14,008 releases the Dance Skinsation LP to help jumpstart the Vedette Records label - leading the way for Italians to produce disco music themselves. In 1978, La Bionda emerges with one of the songs many consider to be Italo Disco's very first song: One For You, One For Me.

à suivre...

Discofox?!