Piero Umiliani spent his entire artistic life mediating between jazz, lounge and avant-garde electronic music. When pop culture began glorifying its own past in the 1990s, he too was rediscovered, and his music exerted an influence on artists from Boards of Canada to Broadcast and Machinedrum, all the way to Lil Yachty. This year, the Italian film and library composer would have turned 100. And with Fantasy, an album is now appearing that had lain unreleased in the archive for more than four decades. It is the last library album Umiliani recorded before the effects of a stroke prevented him from composing and recording for several years.
Fantasy, as a document of Umiliani’s late phase as a composer of library music, quite literally has two sides. Side one gathers a series of sometimes dark, experimental electronic tracks. Some of them pass as timeless thanks to their abstract synthesiser sounds. And on side two follows the kind of novelty music that is always readily described as easy listening, but which, on closer listening, proves not to be quite so easy after a
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Fantasy
