La Foresta Incantata  performed by  Piero Umiliani  ()
 
 
 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.  |