Lightening Up at the Red Light Disco

From actor/filmmaker Eli Roth, a cavalcade of saucy Italian soundtrack music

Since January 20, the Life Hack Industrial Complex has been busy cranking out tips for reducing stress, finding “balance,” and enhancing well-being at a dizzying rate. Its bloggers and YouTube sages offer (bipartisan) advice aimed at helping people process what’s become, in the span of just 8 weeks, an avalanche of change coming from Washington.

Here’s one self-care strategy those well-intentioned scribes might have missed: The bubbly disco-adjacent music of Italian sex comedies of the mid 1970s and early ‘80s, the “commedia sex all’Italiana.”

These softcore films weren’t strong on plot – they mostly featured hapless older men lusting after strikingly beautiful Italian women. Their reason for being was to celebrate distinctly European notions of life’s simple (OK, hedonistic) pleasures. Where the revered masters of Italian film were telling big, sweeping stories, the makers of these films proffered frothy, gently risque escape.

These movies were hugely successful.

There’s no way they’d be made today.

That doesn’t mean they’re artless.

In fact, their soundtracks contain a blithe, defiantly uncomplicated party music that may cause sudden unexpected giddiness. And Richard Simmons happy feet. And outbreaks of side-to-side hip motion combined with spontaneous pouty face. They’re mood enhancers, plain and simple.

As American actor and director Eli Roth (whose filmography includes splatter films Hostel and Thanksgiving) writes in the notes of his new compilation Red Light Disco: Dancefloor Seductions From Italian Sexploitation Cinema, the delight of these films begins (and sometimes ends) with the music that surges through scenes in discos and lounges. “When I became obsessed with the music of the Italian genre films of the 1970s,” Roth writes, “these tracks were impossible to find outside of the films themselves. I would rip the music from the DVDs or VHS tapes, often with the dialogue, because I couldn’t find them anywhere else.”

CAM Sugar, a terrific label devoted to film music from the golden age of Italian film, invited Roth to comb its vaults for Red Light Disco. He came back with compositions by revered Italian film composers including Bruno Nicolai and Gianni Ferrio, whose “Quando Vuoi Con Chi Vuoi,” from 1979, conjures the cocaine dizzyness of a crowded dancefloor. There are pieces that emulate the melodic devices of the prolific Ennio Morricone, like “Amori Stellari- Giochi erotici nelia terza Galassia,” composed for studio orchestra by Don Powell:

Not everything is frenetic: Check the tasty electric piano soloing that slithers through most of Franco Campanino’s “Avere vent’anni,” below.

Roth’s goal was simple: “I wanted to curate a party,” he writes, “a very cool very groovy Italian disco party, as if we were all in a scene from one of these movies.”

Sometimes that led him to songs that are slyly sophisticated and gloriously lowbrow at the same time, like the generically Latin “Do It With the Pamango.” (See if you pick up the no-static-at-all nods in the direction of Steely Dan’s “FM,” right down to the spirited Larry Carlton-emulating guitar break….).

And sometimes Roth’s search led to songs that haven’t seen wide release because they’re little more than exercises in copyright infringement. Daniele Patucchi’s “Runnin’ Around” grabs all the candy from Lipps Inc.’s “Funky Town” without bothering to hide its source material – the cowbell and claps from Roland drum machines, the octave leaps in the bassline, the vocoder voice and all the rest.

Unlike many of the recordings discussed here at Echo Locator, Red Light Disco is hardly life-changing. It’s genre music in the service of a product, music as utility background element. These tracks were made during a heyday moment of Italian film when composers were hired to create music in bulk – songs in various styles and tempos that were available to directors and producers who needed sonic atmospheres cheap – and on short notice.

This type of “library music” can often feel thin, pastiche-like, vacant, meaningless when heard apart from the visuals. Roth cannily avoided that with his selections for Red Light Disco, many of which achieve a golden mean of mindlessness and dancefloor heat. Not only is this music lively and alive, it calls out to a weary, overwhelmed, cellphone-distracted modern population with sounds from a simpler time that say: Hey you! Lighten up!

Coming Soon: Highlights from other CAM Sugar compilations.