Riz Ortolani - Passi Di Morte Perduti Nel Buio

Coming back to this series after a break of a three weeks. Without going into much detail there was a lot of travelling, multiple threads going on and in general a hefty schedule of things to get through that didn’t really allow much time to muse about the music that’s crossing my mind at any given time.

So with that return I thought I’d start off again with a rather impulsive entry, rather than engage with many half-written drafts of other tracks that have been amassing which will see the light of day at some point.

Over the past week I think I’ve overall been wanting have a brief escape from music that I’m familiar with, especially anything that falls heavily into the realm of electronic music — well, at least the kind that is quantized within an inch of its life — the kind of music one can almost visualize the piano roll in a DAW (digital audio workstation) in Arrange mode (or Session mode, if we’re visualising Ableton Live)  when listening.

Often in these cases I’ll move as far as I can away from this kind of music and trying out old favourites that are completely on the other side of things aesthetically, or perhaps try out listening to things like film soundtracks where the range of moods jump around: from music that evokes suspense and then to other moods: pensiveness, romance, solemnity, playfulness… the list goes on. In general, there’s more of that “mixed bag” feel with soundtracks rather than more artist-driven music on its own where it may tend not to stray as much in terms of a set mood.

Investigating the realm of giallo soundtracks — a film genre I’ve been mining extensively over the past couple of years — I singled out this piece by prolific Italian composer Riz Ortolani when it came on during a fan’s curated playlist. It’s the title track from a film that shares the same name as the piece’s title, Passi Di Morte Perduti Nel Buio — also known by its English title, Death Steps In The Dark — directed by Maurizio Pradeaux. It’s one giallo I haven’t seen yet so one to add to the list I suppose.

This track is a short piece that just starts out with a reverberated percussion sound, like a bass drum or tom out of dead silence, and then to have jagged progressions of chords that feel like they’re moving downward as the root note progression seems to with each passing phrase descends further down a tense, chromatic staircase with the instrumentation comprising of strings and an electric bass guitar. I have a soft spot for traditional orchestral arrangements over the nice, round sound of a classic bass guitar tone —something quite common in Italian film scores in the late 1960s going into the late 1970s. In between these phrases we have icy blasts of piano stabs ringing out with a tasteful amount of delay out of the black, empty space when the instrumentation gets really sparse.

Overall it is discordant and short, but engaging. As the track progresses into the last minute of its three minute running time, the tension eases a bit with the various stringed instruments overlapping each other in a way that continuously is changing the chord structure — reminding me at times of the work of Hungarian composer György Ligeti and his Lontano composition from the late 1960s which heavily used string arrangements and features quite prominently in the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of The Shining (1978).

Much like fellow Italian composer Ennio Morricone, Ortolani’s work — mainly being soundtrack work — is quite varied, including more standard orchestral scores but even crossing into what might have been an intepretation of “modern synth rock” of the time when he scored Lucio Fulci‘s 1984 futuristic warrior/gladiator film I Guerrieri Dell’Anno 2072 (Warriors Of The Year 2027) which has more in common with American television scores of the time, and generally fitting into the over-saturated world of lower budget, dystopian/apocalyptic films that were coming out thick and fast around that period, which I covered in an old piece I wrote on this very website.