Slowing creeping back into the minds and dancefloors of electronic music lovers over the past couple of decades has been the genre known as italo or italo disco, with a broad spectrum of listeners — from those who love house and disco to those who tend to listen to darker sounds on the electronic spectrum. I think I first came across it back at the turn of the millenium, back when I had a regular DJ night in Vancouver with two friends of mine that happened every Thursday over the span of two years. Yes, it was far more common for regular club nights to happen that frequently back in those days.
Overall the range of what was considered italo is broad, pulling elements from — well — disco, hi NRG, new wave and synthpop. It was definitely something that flourished more in continental Europe than countries such as the UK and other anglophile countries, and the music itself actually wasn’t solely out of the country of Italy, as the genre’s name comes from, but with other countries such as Germany putting out its fair share of music that gets grouped in this genre.
The night I was involved with for those two years was called Movement (flyer shown at the bottom, with an early design I did that’s rife with Postscript errors) and took place at a rather eclectic venue near Victory Square in Vancouver called The Element — a venue now long gone and that changed hands with several owners after our time there.
The three of us would alternate sets throughout the night to a bustling group of regulars who came to have a drink (or several) and dance, and with that some of the material DJ Epine (my old friend Michelle) played caught my ear. She had come from a small town in the middle of British Columbia yet had an impressive amount of records that piqued my curiousity in how she even discovered this music — records from genres such as minimal wave (before the term was even coined in the mid-2000s), post-punk and of course, italo disco — which I don’t think I had heard before our nightclub collaboration, or at least if had heard anything in that style before I didn’t even know what it was until that time. She would often play tracks by groups such as The Immortals, Lime (who were actually Canadian, from Montréal), The Creatures and many more.
As the years went on, especially after I had moved over to London, I discovered far more records in this genre. I found myself being attracted to releases in the genre which demonstrated a more melancholic and darker side of the genre as it tapped into a lot of sensibilities that I already had with darker post-punk, new wave, “goth” rock, industrial… and so on. I don’t really have a particular time frame that I was unearthing artists that tapped into this gloomier and atmospheric side of the genre, but I’d say a lot of it was in the years following my move across the Atlantic.
As with many artists working in the italo genre, many of them put out a string of singles or one seminal release and then sort of dissolved into the ether, only to be picked up on years later in the 21st century and get a full re-release treatment, such as the Italian group Victrola, also covered in this Track Of The Day series.
Such is the case with the one release by the mysterious Italian duo from the mid-1980s with the fractured name of Ein-st-ein, whom I know somewhat very little about given their lack of information online. It would seem that they have really only released one track — yet one amazing track — called “Varsavia” (Italian for Warsaw) which even then only got a full treatment release in 2012 — almost thirty years after its original recording back in 1985 — on the Netherlands label Bordello A Parigi. This release contains what are labelled as the “LP” and “Tape” versions of this track (which have minute differences between one another) and a B-Side called “Warsaw”, which is less of a track and more of a studio experience where it almost sounds like a version of “Varsavia” played in reverse.
Ok — so a “one trick pony” so to speak but a trick performed exceptionally well. It’s a plodding number, with a drum pattern that has ghost echos (at least to me) of “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush, and some incredibly lush synthesizer work, including shimmering and chiming lush pads and soft leads with some wavering LFO detail. The verses tend to sound more cold and grey but when the track breaks into the chorus the subtle changes in chords and instrumentation seem to almost bring in a flood of colour.
There’s some interesting other details, such as background samples of conversation, ghostly vocals hiding behind the synths in the higher octave ranges, as well as some meandering chord progressions, especially in what might be the “bridge” of the track. Then, the final chorus extends into an outro that is as glorious as it is moodily beautiful.
And because of these interesting chord changes, there’s often parts — especially in the transitions — that contain a bit of harmonious discord as instrumentation from these different parts briefly overlap each other, adding a bit of tension and suspense to an otherwise dreamy, washed out composition.
It’s a track I’ll play out when I occasionally DJ, or when asked to curate music for a radio show, such as this old interview/radio feature I did back in 2014 on the London radio station Resonance 104.4 for the show A Colder Consciousness. For me it’s one of those tracks to close out an amazing club night when feelings of closeness with your friends and emotions are at a climax, whisking everyone away for one last dreamlike turn on the smoke-filled dance floor.
I can think of numerous other key tracks that fill the same general space and mood as “Varsavia” in this genre that is known as italo, but rather than crunching them all into a compiled list in this entry and with that doing them a dis-service — as they’d suit their own feature done in writing — I’ll likely save them in my arsenal for some future rainy day to give them a proper entry in this them thar Track Of The Day thing.
