And here we are with another entry after a rather busy week consisting of a local Glasgow performance with a good friend and Berlin-based electronic music artist Oberst Panizza and a comeback show of sorts for friends and local giallo disco outfit Ubre Blanca — who played a blazing first show after what was about a seven year absence from the stage. It was the better part of a week of lovely houseguests and connecting with old friends that contrasted with a number of days of being struck down by a strong winter cold/virus that knocked me for six. It’s a great feeling to now be almost fully recovered from that and moving things forward again.
Still fresh on my mind is this little entry on a somewhat rare italo disco track called “Reflections” by Alessandri — a track I remember having a discussion about with my friend Olivier from Oberst Panizza while he was in town. I don’t know how this discussion came about but perhaps it stems from my fascination with what I might say is the concept of déja vu in music. Something you’ve heard before. I mean, with decades of “popular” music all riffing from the same collective, creative consciousness of chords, structure, emotion, rhythm and feeling one could argue there’s similarilities across the majority of music. Music is generally written in multiples of four — four beats to a bar, the snare falling on the third count, repetitions of motifs happening in fours. I suppose it’s the rhythm of how our human consciousness works. There’s many, many connections one can make across all of the different ways people express themselves and their ideas through music.
Over the years I’ve played around with this concept in the way I write music. I’ll consciously repeat and re-use motifs, melodies and even specific lyrical phrases in music across multiple compositions I’ve written over the years. I recently came to a realisation that a lot of my ideas come to me and I don’t really have a choice in the matter. It’s probably why I’ve still been pressing ahead with creating music and playing it out after all of these years and probably will hopefully for years to come. I can’t stop the ideas and there’s some demand within me that I continue working with them.
Some ideas get recycled in different ways, and some more obvious than others. Coming back to “Reflections”, it’s a track released in 1986 by an Italian production team with the compositional work done by Italian producer/songwriter Walter Bassani and acts as a B-Side track on a release called Il Mondo. In this case this B-Side is far more seductive than the more “sunnier” sounding title track that makes the A-Side. “Reflections” follows a moody and melancholy atmosphere that almost has a dream-like state, with a simple background vocal (“reflections of my mind…”) being spoken over lush and mournful synthesizer pads, shrouded in a repeating delay.
Around the 2m15s mark there’s a notable key change in the track, one that brings a sunnier feeling of optimism as the chords used shy away a bit from the minor key mode of the song’s main motif. From there the song returns to the main phrase and then as it starts to conclude around the 3m20s mark it shifts to a variant of this main phrase, albeit with grander, major chords injected into the progression.
It’s a structure that is memorable, so much so that another italo track by another one-off Italian synth duo called Klapto used this full structure with eerie familiarity on their 1984 hit “Queen Of The Night” (see below for a video of an Italian TV performance of this track). Although the energy and details of its instrumentation are noticeably different, along with far more prominent vocals, underneath this track’s seemingly different energy is what can be heard as the same general chord structure and key changes from “Reflections” by Alessandri.
The common creative bond between these two tracks lies in composter Walter Bassani, who was involved in both projects. One might think why a composer would want to re-submit what is essentially the same song — albeit with two noticeably different variants — onto the consuming musical public but I can perhaps think of a couple of reasons why. Perhaps it was a compositional milestone for the artist and perhaps where one version didn’t land its mark into lexicon of synth-pop he wanted to give it another shot. Perhaps he felt the track could have a different feeling for the listener if it was done in a slightly different style and mode. Or perhaps he needed to fill out the B-Side of Alessandri‘s Il Mondo with an instant solution, therefore just opting to rework a previously released track in a new production due to a deadline or whatever. There could be many reasons here.
There’s some possible reasons for this that I can relate to. Sometimes when working on a track the possibilities of where a track can fork off to towards its logical conclusion can take one of multiple possibilities. There’s a Soft Riot track called “Cinema Eyes” that there’s about 4-5 versions of it that exist, which is covered in some detail here.
More recently, the opening track “Linked Between Two Minds” from the album No. was reworked as an experimental ambient number from an accompanying single of the same name. When writing the album version, there was another version drumming around in the back of my mind that pulled out the track’s key melodies and more atmospheric elements that I decided I wanted to explore, becoming “Linked Between Two Minds (Night Trance Version)”.
Outside of my own musical creations I’ve come across these ideas — and the concept of déja vu — in the music of other artists. It’s probably a concept I’ll explore here in further entries to come as there’s already numerous examples coming to mind that I’ll eventually get around to sharing at some point!