A super cool instrumental track which for me is one of the highlights of the Italian 'Easy Tempo' series of film music compilations. A laid back funky beat drives the song forward. Strings seep in and out, twangy guitars play on. I guess if you're reading this you are getting the picture of the kind of stuff I like by now...

Although I'm very interested in the batch of cool Italian soundtracks from the 60s and 70s which have recently been reissued, I often feel pretty overwhelmed by the volume of stuff out there. So I was pleased to find a used copy of Piero Umiliani's 'Angeli Bianchi...Angeli Neri'. It really is an intoxicatingly brilliant record, and this track is one of the highlights. The musical setting moves around a lot over four minutes - the opening sounds almost like fairy tale music; this then fades out, and some spooky and very cool sounding wordless vocals come in, accompanied by a slick, hip easy listening-style sequence with strings, bass and drums. As this builds, the wordless vocals continue, backed by increasingly beautiful and unexpected chord changes. I'm not doing a great job of describing this record, but happily in this case you can hear the whole song (streamed, real audio) at the excellent 'atrecordings.com' site. Anyway, it's a wonderful track, up there with my absolute favorite soundtrack pieces.

Japanese born, residing in Italy to run Temposphere, a division of Right Tempo, Gak Sato creates a Nouveau-Samba with shimmery electronics to match the bed of Brazilian drums. But above all, this track also features soulful and surreal vocals of the "Lounge Lizard's" Steve Piccolo.