Italo Disco

[RoyBatty]

A thread for Italian / Eurodisco tunes. Not all artists in this genre were necessarily Italian. Some German examples included Modern Talking (cough), Sandra etc.


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[Troll's Puzzle]

super thread, Roy! (good choice of songs too) http://www.tehdriven.com/forum/images/smilies/custom/gayflag.gif - rather out-there choice of thread, either you've something in the closet to let out..
...or you know there's a fan of this genre here ;)

a lot of italo/euro disco is awful, and the best should be still awful, IMO a casio synth over a disco beat with some eurotrash girl 'singing' nonsense in english is the pinnacle of culture (I'm serious BTW). as 80's as it gets!
the first stuff from the early 80's is a bit 'darker' sound though.

Charlie - Space Woman 1984 - this one is probably good enough that it might be enjoyed at an EBM night
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Roni Griffith - Spies (1982) - not actually european but made by an italian american so close enough
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Fun Fun - Happy Station (1984) - typically confused early music video & 'great' dance routines (watch out Jacko!)
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[RoyBatty]

Why thank you darling :)

Whenever I become cynical about humanity it gives me hope for the future that there are still people such as yourself with style and class such who can appreciate the finer things in life.

[RoyBatty]

super thread, Roy! (good choice of songs too) http://www.tehdriven.com/forum/images/smilies/custom/gayflag.gif - rather out-there choice of thread, either you've something in the closet to let out..
...or you know there's a fan of this genre here ;)


Nothing in the closet I'm afraid, I'm as unstylish and devoid of haute couture as a male can possibly get. Perhaps I should try to make more of an effort.....



a lot of italo/euro disco is awful,


As is any music form



and the best should be still awful,


Depends on what criteria one uses to judge "awfulness". Italo will necessarily sound awful to fans of altrock or metal or...... X-Factor fans (because they don't listen to old music).

Part of the appeal of Italo for me is that:

- yes, it can be cheesy sometimes, so what (like Italian 1980's B-Movies)
- the obvious high enthusiasm levels juxtaposed against lower skill / equipment knowledge levels. Makes it sort of charming.



IMO a casio synth over a disco beat with some eurotrash girl 'singing' nonsense in english is the pinnacle of culture (I'm serious BTW). as 80's as it gets!


Heh.... much of Italo wasn't produced on Fisher Price synths or consumergrade Casio's. (And even Casio made some reasonably decent synths back in the day).

The producers used a lot of classic analogue equipment like Sequential Prophet's, Roland Jupiter's, Elka Synthex's etc. Some of the producers of the time were pretty loaded and had excellent equipment. The kind of stuff that today goes for insane amounts of money on the second hand market.


the first stuff from the early 80's is a bit 'darker' sound though.


Sure

Thanks for the tracks btw :)

[manu]

Giorgio Moroder - From Here To Eternity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OU7Hka_--U

[Sally]

I looove Italo Disco! :thumb001:

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[RoyBatty]

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Some craziness here... Ku Klux Klan & the Kindergarten :D

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French Italo here

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[Turkophagos]

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[RoyBatty]

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[RoyBatty]

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[RoyBatty]

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[MagnaLaurentia]

Modern 2000 Italian music (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYwlptDYJGk)

Thank god... :D

[Troll's Puzzle]

:cheer_icoon:Eurotrash party ALL NITE LONG!!!:cheer_icoon:
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[San Galgano]

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[San Galgano]

some other Italo Disco::D

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Stefano Zandri alias Den Harrow::D
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[San Galgano]

I would like to add even some Italo-Dance of the 90's:D
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[RoyBatty]

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[RoyBatty]

And here's an example of how artists "borrow" from one another. This Fun Fun track sounds suspiciously like Bananarama's "Love In The First Degree". :D

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vs

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[RoyBatty]

Sabrina performing "Boys Boys Boys" at Spielbude show. The keyboard player is priceless, lol :D

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[manu]

my favourite Ivana Spagna song, Every Girl and Boy. Unlike Sabrina she allegedly wrote her songs by her own.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN_gP9ZfIck

[RoyBatty]

You may or may not know this 1996 album by Sabrina, it's in Italian and in the rock genre and very unlike her typical pop tunes. It's surprisingly good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maschio_Dove_Sei

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/58/Maschio_dove_sei.jpg


BTW, I believe Spagna was one of the (real) singers of "Fun Fun". The girls in the videos were models.


These Sabrina tracks aren't "Italo" style but what the heck....

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[Trencavel]

Couldn't Resist

Droids - Force

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Space - Magic Fly

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and the dirty cowboy hehe

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[RoyBatty]

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[Turkophagos]

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[Troll's Puzzle]

the best version of this song (often mistakenly attributed to Kraftwerk :confused: or even Jean-Michelle Jarre :confused::confused:)

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[Gálvez]

Sandy Marton, impossible to forget him... :D

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[Kataphraktoi]

Bumping this thread, glad to see other people like this music because it's great. Here are some of my favourites:

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Here's some new stuff which is great too:

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[Troll's Puzzle]

Bobby Orlando je Italian-American and so is called 'hi nrg' rather than italo by purists but it's all the same to me....

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^ I like the 80s staging and hair on display here. I always wondered if New Order were listening to this when making 'Blue Monday'. Pet Shop Boys also went out of there way to get bobby 'o' to produce for them.

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^ lush synth sound in the intro.

PS:

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LOL

[Peyrol]

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[RoyBatty]

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Compare that to this mid-80's TV theme tune produced in the evil Apartheid Sarf-Efrika

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Yes... it's Thunderbirds-R-Cape Dutch!!!! :D

[tu_veneno]

Are Modern Talking classified as Italo-Disco too?

[RoyBatty]

Nahh, MT are possibly Eurobeat or something like that?

It's not too dissimilar from Italo and some people would even call it Italo but imo it isn't at all.

[Peyrol]

77 mixed songs :D

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[Pellonpekko]

Hah! :D

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Italo rulez ;) :cool:

[RoyBatty]

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[Padre Organtino]

There's one and only true Messiah

http://www.the-scene.ru/data/artists/283/full/toto_cutugno1_1.jpg

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[RoyBatty]

When I was in Ukraine last year Kiev was plastered full of Toto posters :D

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[RoyBatty]

Space Italo :D

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[Troll's Puzzle]

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:dancing::joy:dancing:
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[RoyBatty]

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[Peyrol]

Masterpiece

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[Pellonpekko]

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One of my new favorites!

[Body And Soul]

This man is a God.

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[RoyBatty]

This man is a God.

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Yes he is. But this track is most definitely not Italo Disco. Neither is "From Here To Eternity". :D

[Body And Soul]

Yes he is. But this track is most definitely not Italo Disco. Neither is "From Here To Eternity". :D
It's very Italo Disco ;) Listen to the Munich Machine, which was Moroder's group. He's considered the father of Italo Disco.

[Richard]

Dinarid robot:D
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[RoyBatty]

It's very Italo Disco ;) Listen to the Munich Machine, which was Moroder's group. He's considered the father of Italo Disco.

Of course they'd have looked up to him (he's an electronic pop pioneer after all) but Italo is a much cheesier style of music than what Hans-Jörg typically did.

There are plenty of examples on this thread. The music just isn't quite the same :D

[Sally]

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[Body And Soul]

Of course they'd have looked up to him (he's an electronic pop pioneer after all) but Italo is a much cheesier style of music than what Hans-Jörg typically did.

There are plenty of examples on this thread. The music just isn't quite the same :D

Ok. Btw his music has always been labeled Italo Disco, for many reasons ;)

[Body And Soul]

This is one of the most famous Italo Disco songs - Claudio Simonetti's band:

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[Aivap]

Probably it's because I' m too much young, but I' ve never listened to these bands and singers. And this is the first time in my life I hear about them!

[Body And Soul]

:D:D:D:D

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[RoyBatty]

Ok. Btw his music has always been labeled Italo Disco, for many reasons ;)

It's an interesting debate, there are arguments for and against. Imo he was a huge influence on Italo, but his music isn't. The style, the production quality, the recording locations, the markets he was playing to etc are not "Italo", imo.



Some debates and articles on the topic:




Italo Disco is, well, disco from Italy (mostly Milan, really), and its golden age was approximately 1980-1985. It was influenced in equal parts by American & Canadian disco, Giorgio Moroder-style Euro-disco, and 1970s electronic music like Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre, and the like. So basically what we've got here is another odd, techy offshoot of classic disco with weird synth noises and terrible broken English. Which means I love it.

A lot of people use "Italo Disco" as a blanket term to mean any mostly-electronic disco, lumping in Quebecois disco, Euro-disco (which was mostly based out of Munich & Paris), even San Fran Hi-NRG. Those people are wrong. For instance, if anybody tries to tell you that Lime or Bobby Orlando or Giorgio Moroder are Italo-Disco, stop listening to them. (Yes yes, I know, Moroder was born in Italy. But he was ethnically Tyrolean, his native tongue was German, and every record he made was recorded in Munich or Los Angeles. Besides, some tiny village in the Dolomites where they speak Ladin or Romansh or whatever has a lot more in common with Innsbruck than with Milan.)




Does some of Giorgio Moroder's late 70s output count as early Italo Disco?
I am not speaking of string laden early disco songs such as "Love To Love You Baby", but stuff in the vein of "I Feel Love", "Sunset People" and that 1979 album by Sparks.

The reason why I am asking is I plan to burn myself a 4-5 CD chronological anthology of Italo Disco, and as I know there are lots of Italo Disco fans here on ILX, it would be great to have your opinion on this before I decide whether to include a couple Moroder tracks at the beginning or not.

Some reasons why he may be classified as Italo Disco:

- Giorgio Moroder, without any doubt, is actually very Italian indeed

- Some of his late 70s output has a lot in common with Italo Disco musically: 4/4 disco beats, lots of synth, and those repetitive synth patterns that are so typical of the genre


However, on the other hand, I rarely see him lumped together with the other names associated with the genre, he worked mainly with Americans and Germans, and he has indeed produced a lot of stuff that has absolutely nothing in common with Italo Disco (I mean, "Take My Breath Away" and "Love Missile F1-11", obviously...)

So what is your opinion? Do "Sunset People" and "The Number One Song In Heaven" belong at the beginning of an Italo Disco anthology? Yes or No? And Why? Why Not?


http://yearofmixtapes.blogspot.com/2010/02/week-36-italo-disco.html

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=41&threadid=47347

[Peyrol]

Listen at 3:15....definitely, one of the best italosong ever!

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[RoyBatty]

..

[Richard]

Not properly italo-disco but Sparks were crazy!
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[RoyBatty]

Probably it's because I' m too much young, but I' ve never listened to these bands and singers. And this is the first time in my life I hear about them!

Yes, the mid 1980's were the peak. It faded away by the end 80's although a few contemporary artists do remain.

[Body And Soul]

It's an interesting debate, there are arguments for and against. Imo he was a huge influence on Italo, but his music isn't. The style, the production quality, the recording locations, the markets he was playing to etc are not "Italo", imo.



Some debates and articles on the topic:

Well, thank you. I'm gonna read it carefully. It's not real my fav kind of music, so i'm not an expert. Probably it was just related to "Italo Disco" cause of the origins of Moroder and the historical period. Maybe like "new wave" label which was, in reality, a very big variety of sub-types.
I think it's always hard to define exactly where a musical type begins and what are its borders.






http://yearofmixtapes.blogspot.com/2010/02/week-36-italo-disco.html

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=41&threadid=47347

[Body And Soul]

Post deleted.

[Pellonpekko]

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[Pellonpekko]

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:cool:

[Peyrol]

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[RoyBatty]

This track is not really Italo but is often included in Italo compilations from that era. It was written / produced by Harold Faltermeyer (Top Gun sountrack, Axel F etc)

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[RoyBatty]

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[Pellonpekko]

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So so, if this is Italo Disco or not. But guess the band is from Italy and the lyrics are basic Italo stuff.

And you'd be such a fool compete with their superbrains

:cool:

[Pellonpekko]

Neo Italo Disco from Sweden.

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PS. In near future, you might hear a song made by me and my friend (who is a musical wizard, i´m far from it.) But he also got to the italo "scene" and we laughed that we have to make our own song. I promised to write incredibly cheesy lyrics with bad english grammar to make it more authentic. I promised also to sing, so... It´s going to be incredibly fun!

[Pellonpekko]

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[Pellonpekko]

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[Pellonpekko]

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:D

[Peyrol]

Who remember this? Very popular and classic here :D

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[Sinbad]

Disco sucks in any language.......

[Aces High]

Disco sucks in any language.......

Dont tell me you dont turn up ther car radio or reach for your roller skates when this comes on.

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[Sinbad]

Dont tell me you dont turn up ther car radio or reach for your roller skates when this comes on.

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no i'd properly turn it off. And my rollerskates are around 4 sizes to small.......

[Peyrol]

This is probabily my favourite '80s italodisco song.

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