Transvitaexpress (Racconto Psicofonico Dell'aldilà)

One of the great puzzlers of Italian underground music, Transvitaexpress: Racconto psicofonico dell’aldilá is out there on a limb, even within the context of avant experimentation in Italy in the seventies. Marcello Giombini was a composer best known for film scores – he’d written soundtracks for countless Spaghetti Westerns and giallo films – but Transvitaexpress had Giombini particularly curious about the possibilities of tape editing and construction. While the album has some choice passages of electronic non-pop, with texts from Barbarino, the most compelling aspects of Transvitaexpress are its attempts at narrative through tape manipulation, nudging the story along with curious edits of electronics, found sound, field recordings, and other sonic detritus, the better to realise Giombini’s delirious ‘psychophonic’ tale. Given Giombini’s grounding in soundtracks and library music, it’s no surprise that there’s a cinematic cast to the album, but it also speaks to the experimentation that was inherent, yet often implicit, in those genres.