It sounds like a fairy tale — and perhaps it is one. After fifty years, the original tapes of the soundtrack to Andrea Bianchi’s infamous giallo film Nude Per L’Assassino (German title: »Der geheimnisvolle Killer«) have been discovered in a dusty cellar. The music for this 1975 feast of sex and violence — still banned from screening in Germany — was composed by Berto Pisano and Elsio Mancuso. For decades, this score existed only in the fevered dreams of dedicated soundtrack collectors. Now that it has finally surfaced, we know: the hype was justified. Nude Per L’Assassino feels like both the summit and swansong of an era when film music still seemed capable of anything.
Styles shift here as rapidly as moods: jazz-funk, lounge music with tiny barbs, atonal experiments, psychedelic nightmare sequences, beauty and paranoia. Trumpeter Oscar Valdambrini and vocalist Edda Dell’Orso, long-time collaborator of Ennio Morricone, emerge as the main protagonists of this soundtrack album. It’s music like a fever dream — sugar and whip, sex and violence, sometimes in sequence, sometimes all at once.
