Various Artists

New Tape

BY Brock ThiessenPublished Feb 27, 2019

7
It's no secret that Sonor Music Editions has a thing for '70s Italian library label New Tape. After all, the reissue hub has not only recently treated various New Tape albums to digital releases, but it also gave Enzo Scoppa & Cicci Santucci's label highlight, Mirage, a vinyl reissue last year. Doubling down, Sonor is now shining a light on New Tape once again, via a greatest hits of sorts.
 
Simply titled New Tape, the comp collects tracks from across the long-gone library label's catalogue, which only consisted of five insanely limited-run albums released at the dawn of the 1970s. In addition to cuts from Scoppa & Santucci's stunning Mirage, the imprint featured works by library mysteries such as Ruscigan, Romolo Grano and the Easy Tempo-championed Lesiman, who also contributed to New Tape under his birth name Paolo Renosto.
 
Packaged together, the music of New Tape is an eccentric, though fascinating, bunch. With avant-jazz threads throughout, the cherry-picked collection offers a lot — from fuzz-scorching blues-rock hybrids (Scoppa & Santucci's "Folksom") and funked-out psych cuts (Santucci's "Liverpool"), to exotica-dabbling chillouts (Grano's "Theme for Kamala") and soft-focus bossa nova numbers (Girosan's "Stefania").
 
But then there's the wilder side of New Tape, such as the retro-futurist Hammond-loaded "Macchine Nello Spazio" by Renosto, and the proto-industrial deconstructionist avant-garde of "Macerie" and "Violenza" by Ruscigan.
 
And while this may seem like some ADD-affected channel surf, New Tape works very much like library music does as a whole, where no genre is out of bounds and musical freedom trumps all. Like with all great library music, the new expression of music is at the core — and that comes through in shining colours on New Tape.
(Sonor Music Editions)

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