1. Toward a phenomenology of “service music”

What does it mean to take seriously—fully, to the end—what critical tradition has dismissed as “service music”? The Italian electronic library music produced between the late 1960s and the early 1980s—and, in particular, a core set of works by Giampiero Boneschi, Piero Umiliani/Moggi, and Giuliano Sorgini—offers an exemplary testing ground for measuring the effects of a shift in perspective: from the functional margin to the center of the aesthetic laboratory. This is not a simple exercise in retrospective revaluation of objects now fetishized by the vinyl market, but an inquiry into the very conditions of possibility of an Italian sonic modernity that largely took shape outside the canonical sites of legitimation: theaters, concert halls, “new music” festivals.

Library music is born, in fact—at least in its industrial form—as the invisible infrastructure of audiovisual culture: thematic catalogues designed for television editorial offices, film production studios, advertising agencies, in which tracks are classified by duration, atmosphere, intended use, rather than by belonging to a genre or an authorial project. It is music that does not aim to build an “audience” in the strong sense, but a readiness: ready-to-use repertoires, potentially and infinitely recontextualizable, where the figure of the composer is bent to the needs of a diffuse commission, often anonymous, almost always mediated by technical and bureaucratic apparatuses. It is precisely within this seemingly subordinate space that Italian library music develops, in a few years, an experimental density with few equivalents in the European landscape, as some rare surveys devoted to the catalogue electronic scene note—albeit mostly from a collector’s perspective.

The paradox—on which it is worth insisting—is that this experimentation does not pass through the work-form, but through the archive-form: instead of large scores, one has numbered series of LPs, with dozens of one- or two-minute tracks, accompanied by telegraphic descriptions (“tension,” “panic,” “rapid action,” “lunar landscape”) meant to guide use, not contemplation. And yet it is precisely this cataloguing seriality that forces the composer into an extreme concentration of gesture: each track must solve, in a few seconds, a problem of atmosphere, recognizability, potential dramaturgical effectiveness. The result is a constellation of sonic micrologies which, when re-listened to out of context, reveal an impressive combination of constructive rigor and timbral abandon: exactly that tension which Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, located between the Apollonian instance of form and the Dionysian instance of losing oneself in the undifferentiated flow.

To adopt the Apollonian/Dionysian axis as a reading grid does not mean overlaying a mythological cliché onto “consumption” materials, but recognizing that the specific industrial configuration of the library—with its tables, codes, standardized durations—produces a regime of order, measure, rationalization of sound that is the medial equivalent of the Apollonian instance. In response—or rather, in internal tension within this regime—the unrestrained use of synthesizers, tape, effects, the preference for hypnotic patterns, for distortions and noises irreducible to traditional tonal grammar, introduces an excessive dimension, one that exceeds pure illustrative function to brush against liminal perceptual states: minimal trance, spatial disorientation, the sensuality of pure timbre. In other words, the Apollonian is embedded in the industrial device (catalogue, grid, format), the Dionysian in the way sound constantly forces its margins.

It is in this interstice that the work of figures such as Boneschi, Umiliani, and Sorgini is situated. Boneschi—jazz musician, orchestra conductor, television man—uses the series A New Sensation in Sound and collections such as Electronic Sound to explore systematically the possibilities of the Moog and other electronic instruments, compressing into a few-minute tracks sequences of timbral experiments that, in the context of art music, would have required monumental works and dedicated institutions. Umiliani, through the Sound Work Shop studio, articulates a personal mythology of the futurible—in albums such as Tra scienza e fantascienza—that occupies an ambiguous territory between soundtrack, library, and concept album, challenging the boundaries between functional music and autonomous listening. Sorgini, finally, moves in yet another direction, bending the library format toward an exploration of the wild, the uncanny, the “primordial” (jungles, rites, sonic bestiaries) that brings to light a Dionysian latent within the very audiovisual rhetoric of the period.

The essay that follows proposes reading these trajectories not as cult exceptions for collectors, but as an index of a broader Italian “sonic thought” which, in the second half of the twentieth century, articulated itself both in the high places of electroacoustic avant-garde and in the “low” circuits of image-production. Electronic library music thus appears as a grey zone in which traditional distinctions—between art music and consumer music, between function and autonomy, between work and service, between Apollonian and Dionysian—cease to be schematic oppositions and become operative tensions. It is in this zone—industrial, anonymous, archival—that one can perhaps recognize one of the places where Italy truly thought (more often without saying so) its own sonic modernity.

2. Ecologies of the Italian library

To place Italian library music within its historical ecosystem means first of all removing it from two specular clichés: on the one hand, the still resilient one of “repertoire music” as anonymous background for a neutral audiovisual industry; on the other, the more recent one of the collector’s fetish, reduced to a curiosity for diggers and rare-vinyl enthusiasts. In reality, the library develops in the Peninsula as a node in a complex network of institutions, technologies, professional practices, and imaginaries that cut across public and private television, genre cinema, advertising, radio—and that reflect in sonic form Italy’s very transformation into a media society.

The industrial reference model is the British one: catalogues such as KPM or De Wolfe had already defined, from the postwar period onward, a new musical form, neither fully autonomous nor simply “applied,” grounded in thematic archives made available to editorial offices, broadcasters, producers. In Italy, however, library music grafts onto a different history: the centrality of RAI as a production hub, the weight of popular cinema (from peplum to poliziottesco), the explosion of television advertising during the boom years, the density of a scene of versatile arrangers and composers who oscillate between jazz, song, soundtrack, “radio-tv use” music. This specific configuration means that the library is not merely an external service, but an integral part of a broader device for sonifying everyday life.

The “golden age” of Italian library music—between the late 1960s and the early 1980s—coincides, not by chance, with a phase of tumultuous expansion of the media system: generalist television consolidates its role, genre film productions multiply their needs for sonic repertoire, television and radio advertising demand jingles, stings, recognizable and flexible backgrounds. It is in this context that catalogues such as CAM, RCA, Omicron, Sermi (among others) build dedicated series, often organized into numbered collections by “moods” and situations: action, tension, landscapes, industrial, science fiction, eroticism, reportage. Each LP is at once a record product and a database segment: its aesthetic identity is subordinate to its efficiency as a repertoire of recombinable sound units.

From the standpoint of professional practices, the library consolidates the figure of the composer equipped as a technician, more than as an author in the Romantic sense. Those who work for these catalogues—Boneschi, Umiliani/Moggi, Sorgini, but also dozens of other less visible names—must master a wide range of idioms (from residual beat to electric jazz, from psychedelic rock to reduced symphonism, up to pure electronics), and translate them into short, highly characterized, easily indexable tracks. The systematic use of pseudonyms—Moggi for Umiliani, for example—and the multiplication of discographic identities signal this liminal position: the composer is both individual and catalogue “function,” a node in a wider network of serial production.

What strikes one today, looking back at the cue sheets and accompanying leaflets of many library LPs, is the degree of rationalization governing the relation between sound and image: to each track corresponds a constellation of possible uses, summarized in a few words that condense narrative situations, emotional states, film genres. This taxonomy is not a mere accessory, but the cognitive infrastructure of the entire system: it is here that music is thought as modular, fungible, cuttable, in a regime we could define—without forcing it—as proto-digital. When, decades later, Italian library music is rediscovered by DJs, producers, curators—and celebrated in articles about its “dramatic library records”—it is precisely this combination of rigid order and sonic excess that constitutes the core of its belated fascination.

Within this ecological frame, the library’s position vis-à-vis Italian music criticism remains, for a long time, that of a foreign body. Official histories of “popular” music privilege the singer-songwriter, progressive rock, political songwriting; those of “art” music follow the thread of institutions (RAI, biennials, university electroacoustic studios). The library, which has neither public nor dedicated stage, slips through the meshes of both narratives. Only in recent times, including internationally, has it begun to be thematized as a specific object of study, linked to reflections on music for media, sampling culture, the economies of digital sonification. It is in this delay—in this deferred temporality of reception—that the possibility of a strong reading takes root: to look at the library not as a picturesque residue, but as a symptom of an Italian way of thinking sound in the era of mass media.

3. Studio, technology, the sound factory

If one enters the library through the door of media ecology, the first figure that comes into view, almost inevitably, is that of the recording studio as machine. Studio understood not as a neutral space in which “one records what has been written elsewhere,” but as a place where writing itself coincides with the use of instruments, effects, editing: a true sound factory. It is on this plane that Italian electronic library music reveals, with particular clarity, its nature as an underground laboratory of sonic modernity: a laboratory in which production pressure (dozens of short tracks in tight timeframes) coexists with an experimental freedom that would scarcely have found citizenship within “new music” institutions.

The years in which Boneschi, Umiliani, and Sorgini work most intensively for catalogues coincide with a phase of rapid hybridization of the instrument park available to those composing for images. Piano and traditional rhythm section coexist with electric organs and first-generation synthesizers; magnetic tape is not only a medium for fixing sound, but a material to cut, overdub, slow down, reverse; reverb and echo devices open acoustic “rooms” that no longer correspond immediately to real places. The library composer is forced to know these tools in an eminently pragmatic key: it is not a matter of demonstrating an aesthetic theorem, but of solving, in a few hours, a sequence of concrete problems—finding the timbre that says “night metropolis,” the rhythmic figure that suggests “run” or “chase,” the blend of noises and notes that evokes “space,” “future,” “alarm.”

In this sense, a working day for a Boneschi or an Umiliani resembles that of a lab technician more than that of the Romantic composer. There is a call sheet—a list of tracks to deliver, sometimes with quite precise usage indications, other times entrusted to the musician’s tacit competence—and a limited time to find, for each, the right fit of patterns, timbres, dynamics. The creative gesture does not precede technology; it passes through it: often a solution arises from an error, an unexpected feedback, a tape saturation, a modulation pushed a bit beyond “good taste.” The sound factory is also a factory of the unforeseen; and the library, with its demand for variety and readiness, offers a context in which these unforeseen events are not expunged, but incorporated as distinctive features of a track, as hidden signatures.

If one looks at the grain of many electronic tracks of the period, a recurring element is microform: two, three minutes at most, often less. This format, imposed first of all by usage needs (music must be easily editable, cut, layered under dialogue and scene noise), produces a particular way of thinking musical time. There is no thematic development in the classical sense, no exposition–development–recapitulation, but rather the institution of a figure—rhythmic, timbral, harmonic—and its concentrated exploration. A cell, a pattern, an ostinato: around this minimal nucleus the studio works as magnifying glass and variation device. The becoming of the track is often the becoming of its timbral saturation, not of its syntactic form.

Here the “factory” dimension intertwines with what one might call a micro-phenomenology of gesture. The composer records a sequence, listens back, intervenes on levels, adds an echo, shifts an accent, filters a portion of the spectrum; each decision is the result of a series of immediate feedback loops between body, machine, listening. The library, by forcing one to repeat this process dozens of times per session, institutionalizes a form of rapid, almost iterative experimentation, which has no time to crystallize into a manifesto, but accumulates—in the catalogue—an impressive quantity of local solutions. Each track is an experiment successful enough to be “usable”: the fact that today one re-listens to them as works in themselves is, in a sense, a retroactive effect of this productive regime.

It is interesting, on this point, to compare the library’s position with that of contemporary electronic music studios tied to universities or radio institutions. There, access to machines is regulated by schedules, approved projects, educational pathways; here, at least in part, the machine is a tool of daily work, a trade tool. There, the composer is called to explain and justify research in theoretical terms; here, the main criterion remains practical effectiveness—but practical effectiveness, for someone who handles synthesizers and tapes daily, quickly becomes also idiomatic refinement, empirical knowledge of what “works,” and often of what works precisely because it exceeds the norm.

This work regime also helps explain the specific intensity with which the Apollonian/Dionysian axis runs through electronic library music. On the Apollonian side, the studio appears as a place of millimetric control: levels, equalizations, panning, synchronizations; the composer is first of all the one who measures and orders. On the Dionysian side, however, the same machine that enables control continually opens breaches: a delay that escapes, an oscillator that flutters, a noise that enters the microphone and is kept rather than removed. Where institutional avant-garde music tends to thematize these events as objects of analysis, in the library they survive as details: small eccentricities that make a track more “alive,” more suited to suggest, to create a halo.

In this perspective, speaking of a sound factory does not mean reducing the library to a serial product, but recognizing that it is precisely seriality that generates, by friction, zones of freedom. Each new track is both repetition of a professional gesture and possibility of deviation; each studio session is at once routine and opening onto something unforeseen. The technical and industrial condition—being at the service of images not yet shot or already cut—thus becomes the concrete historical form in which, for these musicians, the possibility is given to think sound as plastic matter, no longer subordinate to text or melodic theme, but autonomous in its capacity to construct worlds. In this sense, the library is a factory that produces—often despite itself—not only repertoire cues, but also fragments of sonic thought.

4. Giampiero Boneschi and the micrologies of the electronic

Among the many figures populating the constellation of Italian library music, Giampiero Boneschi occupies a paradigmatic position: not so much because he is “more important” than others, but because his trajectory intersects particularly clearly the three poles at stake here—jazz, television, catalogue electronics. Formed in a context of light and orchestral music, his writing rapidly absorbs, between the 1960s and 1970s, the possibilities offered by new electronic instruments, making them not a mere color but the very motor of a series of experiments distributed across dozens of library LPs. The fact that a significant part of this production flowed into the cycles A New Sensation in Sound and into collections such as Electronic Sound allows us today to read that activity not as occasional dispersion, but as an implicit project.

The series A New Sensation in Sound, released by CAM in the early 1970s, is exemplary of the cataloguing logic: each volume bears on its cover a number, a generic title alluding to “new sensations,” and inside a sequence of short tracks, carefully filed by duration and atmosphere. Viewed as a whole, this series appears as an atlas of the electronic and electroacoustic possibilities that a single composer could explore in that context: from more markedly rhythmic pieces, suspended between residual beat and synthetic funk, to nearly abstract miniatures built on patterns of filtered noise, up to tracks that seem like studies on single timbral families (synth strings, simulated winds, electronic percussion). Listening volume after volume, one has the sense of witnessing a process of systematic exploration: not a series of “ideas” destined to evolve into major works, but a constellation of local solutions that find, precisely in their brevity and intended use, their completion.

Within this frame, the collection Giampiero Boneschi’s Electronic Sound (reissued in full in recent years) functions as a kind of metonymic condensation. It is not a “best of” compilation in the canonical sense, but a selection that makes evident how his electronic library work operates on the microscale here called the micrology of the electronic: tracks often under three minutes, built around a dominant timbral or rhythmic idea to which everything else is subordinated. The electronic, in this sense, is not so much a “genre” as a regime of priorities: what matters is the sonic figure as such—the way sound presents itself, insists, changes—more than harmonic progression or an identifiable melody.

Take, for example, a track like Moog’s Bolero, which already in its title lays out the ironic play between learned quotation and contemporary instrumentation. The reference to the bolero points to an archetype of accumulative repetition: a rhythmic cell that remains constant while the orchestral fabric thickens. Boneschi retains the structural principle—ostinato pulse, additive crescendo—but transposes it into an entirely synthetic sound environment. The basic pattern, entrusted to the Moog, does not evolve thematically: what changes is timbral quality, saturation, placement in stereo space. The “crescendo” occurs through densification of frequencies and interferences, more than through the entrance of new themes; what in Ravel was orchestration becomes here manipulation of electronic parameters. The effect is double: on the one hand, the almost mechanical order of the pulse (Apollonian); on the other, the sensation that something in the timbre escapes control, as if the instrument itself had a will to deform (Dionysian).

Another example, such as Engine and Tools, shows a different side of the same logic. Here the generative idea seems to be the translation into sound of an industrial imaginary: engines, gears, tools. The construction of the track proceeds, plausibly, from a rhythmic pattern that imitates the gait of a repetitive machine; onto this base are grafted treated noises, dry hits of electronic percussion, glissandi evoking the whistle of valves and pistons. Again, the track does not “develop” a theme, but constantly varies the relation between ground and figure: at times a quasi-melodic cell emerges, immediately reabsorbed by noise; at times noise itself becomes figure, isolated and pushed into the foreground. The order of the engine—the regular rhythm—coexists with the excess of its own noise, which exceeds illustrative function and imposes itself as physiological presence.

One could continue with Swinging on a Moog and other tracks in which Boneschi experiments with the overlap between jazz idioms and electronic timbres. Here the “swing” element is not so much in rhythmic structure—often made more rigid by programming—as in the treatment of sounds: micro-dephasings, slight pitch oscillations, use of modulations that give the Moog a kind of unstable “voice.” It is as if the jazz idiom—historically associated with improvisation, fluctuation—migrated from the level of melodic line to that of timbral micro-variation: no longer only notes oscillating against a basic time, but timbres oscillating against a perceptual center. In this sense, Boneschi’s jazz is not “reproduced” but internalized within the machine, which absorbs its tension between grid and deviation.

What emerges, looking across these examples, is that Boneschi’s electronic micrology works on at least three axes simultaneously. First: the axis of function, which imposes brevity, clarity, recognizability. Each track must be usable, and thus must “say” something immediately: tension, technology, lightness, irony. Second: the axis of timbral experimentation, which pushes toward testing the behavior of the Moog, effects, combinations of acoustic and electronic instruments, often beyond the threshold of neutrality. Third: the axis of quotation and intertextual play, which brings into the library laboratory fragments of musical history (the bolero, jazz, “industrial” music) treated with a lightness that is itself a form of critical lucidity.

This triple articulation also explains why Boneschi’s library production lends itself so well to a reading along the Apollonian/Dionysian axis. The Apollonian is, here, the complex of constraints defining the field: running time, catalogue taxonomy, functional clarity, the technical measure of studio work. The Dionysian is what happens when sound overtakes the task, when timbre becomes protagonist and drags listening beyond pure illustration, toward a dimension almost tactile, bodily, at times even comic in its exceeding measure. Boneschi’s discreet greatness, in this context, lies in having inhabited that liminal space without turning it into a manifesto, letting the catalogue—this series of LPs with impersonal titles—preserve the trace of one of the subtlest electronic experiences of Italy’s late twentieth century.

5. Piero Umiliani/Moggi: science fiction and the laboratory

If Boneschi embodies the figure of the technician-composer who bends the television apparatus to his electronic curiosity, Piero Umiliani—and his alias Moggi—represents the case of an author who makes the studio itself the center of a private mythology. The trajectory that leads him from jazz (sessions with Chet Baker, “traditional” soundtracks) to intensive work for cinema and television is well known; what matters here is how, at the end of the 1960s, the opening of the Sound Work Shop allows him to radically reconfigure his relationship with sound. The studio is no longer merely a place of recording, but a fully-fledged compositional instrument: a complex machine in which synthesizers, organs, rhythm section, and magnetic tape become the moving parts of a single device.

In this sense, Umiliani’s activity for library music should be read in continuity with that for cinema, not as a separate compartment. The same skills that allow him to build soundscapes for genre films—from poliziottesco to erotic—are used to create abstract repertoires, later gathered into thematic series or albums that only in retrospect appear as coherent works. This is the case with Tra scienza e fantascienza, often defined, not without reason, as “futuristic jam”: a record born in the context of service music, yet immediately exceeding that perimeter, presenting itself as a genuine laboratory of sonic imagination on themes of the future, space, the technological unknown.

What strikes one, listening today, is not so much the use of the synthesizer as such—shared with many contemporaries—but the specific articulation between pattern and atmosphere. Far from merely evoking “space” generically with a few echo effects and some whole-tone scales, Umiliani builds tracks that function as small coherent worlds: cyclical grooves, often entrusted to electric basses and dry drums, over which layers of keyboards, effects, noises are arranged, in an unstable balance between repetition and surprise. It is a second-generation futurism, aware of being already a media “imaginary” more than a historical project, and precisely for this reason capable of playing in a sophisticated way with the genre’s stereotypes.

In tracks such as Danza galattica (the title is emblematic), the choreographic dimension is inseparable from the cosmic one. There is no “space” without a moving body: the rhythmic pattern is built to suggest an almost funk-like motion, but constantly displaced by shifted accents, by drum figures that introduce micro-syncopations, by bass lines that draw orbits rather than simple tonal loops. On this foundation, synthesizers do not present completed themes, but melodic fragments that enter and exit the field, as if they were signals intermittently captured by a radio in transit. The effect is that of a suspended dance that never truly explodes into Dionysian liberation, yet does not remain confined to pure measure either: an unstable equilibrium that is, in filigree, a reflection on the way the body is thought in science fiction—controlled, monitored, and yet always in excess of the devices that govern it.

Other tracks on the record work on different polarities, but with similar finesse. There are pieces that exploit electric-keyboard arpeggios to construct a kind of sonic “water,” a continuous flow onto which point-like events are grafted (prepared-percussion hits, treated noises, brief figures of synthetic winds). In these cases the reference is not so much cinematic science fiction as a nearly ethnographic imaginary dimension: sound environments of non-existent planets, rituals of alien populations, in which the distinction between natural and technological is suspended. Umiliani does not describe space; he inhabits it symbolically, turning the studio into a simulation chamber: each track is the result of a series of trials, overdubs, subtractions, until reaching a density that nevertheless remains surprisingly light to the ear.

The strength of Tra scienza e fantascienza also lies in its ambiguity of placement. On the one hand, its structure makes it perfectly compatible with library use: short tracks, strongly delineated character, titles that signal potential functions and atmospheres. On the other, its timbral and thematic coherence brings it closer to the author-album format, to the point that contemporary reissues present it as a completed work intended for concentrated listening. This double nature—repertoire and concept—is one of the points where the Apollonian and the Dionysian intersect most boldly: the order imposed by the catalogue coincides, almost by accident, with an aesthetic design that exceeds it.

If one broadens the gaze beyond Tra scienza e fantascienza, Umiliani’s figure appears even more complex. Boxes such as Library Music – Volume 1 show an author capable of turning the same sound-design competence toward less spectacular but no less significant directions: tracks designed to describe “today’s problems,” urban situations, industrial contexts, in which electronics coexist with rhythm section and winds, creating hybrids between electric jazz, mannered funk, and almost documentary atmospheres. In these cases, the science-fiction laboratory gives way to a kind of sociological laboratory: music must suggest traffic, bureaucracy, metropolitan tensions, and does so through repetitive patterns, nervous bass lines, metallic timbres that evoke machinery, telephones, keyboards.

From the standpoint of the Apollonian/Dionysian axis, Umiliani occupies a peculiar region. The Apollonian is evident in his ability to organize material, build clear forms, keep the profile of a track legible even when its matter is complex: nothing is ever chaotic; everything is subjected to a chiseling work that reveals a formidable ear for balance. The Dionysian emerges instead in the way certain grooves insist, in the way certain delays are pushed beyond what is necessary, in the way certain synthesizer clusters saturate space precisely at the point where, functionally, a mere fill would suffice. It is as if, within the grid of service music, fissures opened at times where sound lets itself go into a pleasure for its own sake, irreducible to the logic of the “scene” to be commented on.

Ultimately, Umiliani/Moggi allows one to grasp another aspect of Italian electronic library music: the possibility that an author, while working within a rigidly functionalized system, can build for himself a sort of sonic auto-mythology recognizable beyond individual uses. The Sound Work Shop, with its machines, tapes, interminable sessions, is the physical place where this mythology takes shape; the library records—with their often anonymous covers, codes, minimal notes—are the archives in which that mythology remains deposited, waiting to be re-listened to as what it in fact is: one of the most articulated Italian musical reflections on the relationship between technology, imaginary, and body in the second half of the twentieth century.

6. Giuliano Sorgini: forest, bestiary, the uncanny

If Boneschi and Umiliani project library electronics toward the imaginary of the city and the technological future, Giuliano Sorgini explores its opposite side: that of a nature both archaic and artificial, where the “jungle” is at once geographic place, psychic metaphor, and studio construction. His discographic trajectory, long left in shadow and resurfaced thanks to specialized reissues, sits at the margins of the system: he works for television sonifications, documentaries, genre films, and precisely in this lateral position finds space to develop a timbral research that today appears as one of the most radical in the Italian panorama.

Records such as Occulto and Africa Oscura constitute an ideal diptych of this exploration. The first insists on the register of mystery, subterranean tension, the “esoteric” understood not as surface folklore but as density of opaque atmospheres: dry percussion, deep basses, treated noises, vocal fragments transformed into pure breath or lament. The second works explicitly on an “African” imaginary, but does so amphibiously: on the one hand, it draws on percussive patterns and timbres that refer to the Western idea of tribalness; on the other, it locks them into harmonic structures and electronic treatments that betray their constructed nature, their character as artificial forest. The “Africa” evoked by Sorgini coincides with no real place; it is a mental space, an elsewhere serving to externalize a dimension of the wild that the urban lexicon of science fiction cannot contain.

A track like Oasi nella giungla conveys this ambivalence well. The opening is dominated by a percussion pattern that, while vaguely recalling extra-European idioms, is built with almost mechanical rigor: few timbres, few pitches, a regular pulse onto which syncopated counterpoints are grafted. It could, in the abstract, be a base for a natural-history documentary sequence. But after only a few seconds the soundscape thickens: dark bass lines enter, descending chromaticisms that insinuate unease; noises of fronds, animal calls, distant whistles appear, whose origin is hard to establish—field recording, library effects, manipulations of synthetic sounds? The overall effect is not that of a simple exotic “picture,” but of an unstable environment that seems to breathe.

On the formal plane, Oasi nella giungla exemplifies Sorgini’s logic of deferred tension. The track progressively builds an accumulation of elements—percussion, bass, noises, melodic fragments—that would suggest some resolving explosion, a climax. But the climax does not arrive: in its place one has a series of micro-variations, small phase shifts, entrances and exits of details that continually modify perception of the scene without ever closing it. It is like walking through a forest where, at every step, something changes in the arrangement of shadows, without a clearing ever opening. The forest is not only theme; it is form.

This formal forest is also a sonic bestiary. One of the most characteristic aspects of Sorgini’s work is his use of voice and “animal” sounds. In Occulto there often recur non-verbal vocalizations—sighs, whispers, distant cries—treated as instrumental material: filtered, repeated, layered. In the more explicitly “African” albums, animal calls—real or simulated—constitute a further layer of the landscape: sometimes integrated into the pulse, sometimes in contrast with it. This proliferation of non-human presences produces an uncanny effect in the Freudian sense: what should be external, natural, insinuates itself into the domestic space of listening through technological mediation, returning the non-human as part of our own sonic psyche.

From the standpoint of the Apollonian/Dionysian axis, Sorgini seems to shift the balance more decisively toward the second pole, without renouncing strong structural discipline. The Apollonian lies in the millimetric management of the mix, in repetitive patterns that guarantee cohesion, in the ability to build formal arcs even within relatively short durations. The Dionysian inhabits the very choice of materials: the systematic recourse to sounds that exceed language—cries, calls, noises of bodies and objects—and the way these materials are made to circulate within the track, bypassing customary hierarchies between “figure” and “background.” In many tracks, the most disturbing element is not what is in the foreground, but something moving at the margins of the stereo field, a presence one senses more than hears clearly: the Dionysian as what insinuates itself in backlight.

Compared to Boneschi and Umiliani, Sorgini also radicalizes the relationship to intended use. His tracks are, evidently, usable as sonifications for documentaries, films, TV segments—and in part they were used as such. But listened to today, often in editions that bring out sequences originally dispersed, they reveal a quasi-narrative coherence that exceeds the fragmentariness of context. The “forestification” of sound, to use a metaphor, is not only a way to illustrate natural images, but a strategy to disarticulate the urban listener’s habitual coordinates of perception: linear time, the centrality of melody, the distinction between music and noise.

In this perspective, Sorgini’s forest appears as an oblique response to Italian media modernity. Where other library composers chose to thematize the city, technology, the future, he constructs an other space in which the Dionysian is no longer linked to the machine but to its imaginary reverse: a nature that, paradoxically, exists only in the studio, only as the product of electronic manipulation. It is a nature without innocence, already filtered by desire and fear, and for that very reason profoundly contemporary.

7. Masked avant-garde and archives of the possible

To place Boneschi, Umiliani, and Sorgini within the cartography of late-twentieth-century electronic musics also means interrogating their relationship to what, in “official” histories, is called the avant-garde. On the one hand, their tools and techniques—synthesizers, tape manipulations, the studio as compositional machine—are not substantially different from those populating university studios, RAI centers, specialized festivals; on the other, the circuit in which they move is almost the opposite: not concert institutions, but industrial catalogues, sonifications, television. This split produces a curious effect: Italian electronic library music is, in fact, a form of avant-garde, but an avant-garde without manifestos, without programmatic texts, without the discursive apparatus that usually accompanies “new music.”

The absence of a manifesto does not imply absence of a project. On the contrary, the seriality of catalogues, the need continually to experiment with new timbral and formal solutions in short, functional formats, constitutes an implicit program that, in retrospect, appears surprisingly coherent. If one leafs through the sheets of a catalogue such as CAM, or the thematic collections of other publishers, one notes how the years between 1968 and 1980 see a progressive thickening of entries dedicated to the electronic, the “futuristic,” the “technological,” “space,” the “industrial”—often with the same small group of recurring composers behind different sigla. It is as if, in just over a decade, the library absorbed and redistributed in capillary form an entire sonic vocabulary that, in high contexts, was thematized as an aesthetic and political problem.

The fact that this avant-garde is masked—disguised as service music—profoundly conditions its reception and memory. For decades, these records circulate almost exclusively as work tools, locked in the archives of broadcasters, production houses, editing studios: eminently functional objects, closer to a film reel than to an LP intended for domestic consumption. When, from the 1990s onward and with greater intensity in the 2000s, vinyl collectors, DJs, media historians begin to take interest, their status changes: they become fragments of a rediscovered sonic past, testimonies of an “other” Italian modernism, more lateral but no less incisive.

This transformation has been described, in international debate, in terms of the library’s afterlife: tracks are extracted from their context, republished in selections, sampled in contemporary productions, discussed in articles emphasizing their “drama,” “strangeness,” cinematic appeal. But reducing the library’s masked avant-garde to its posthumous fortune risks obscuring the decisive point: the archival condition of these materials is not an accident; it is an integral part of their historical form. The library catalogue is not a mere inert deposit; it is a device that presupposes, from the beginning, a logic of reuse, recombination, montage. Each track is born to be potentially replicated in different contexts, synchronized to unpredictable images: this vocation to the possible is inscribed in its structure.

One can then speak of the library as an archive of the possible. Not only because tracks, destined for images that may never arrive, represent latent scenarios; but because their cataloguing organization—the taxonomy by “moods,” “situations,” “ambiences”—places them in an ontological regime different from that of song or work: no longer closed works, but open modules, ready to be activated. In this sense, the library’s masked avant-garde consists less in introducing “new” sounds than in redefining the relation between sound and context, between composition and use. Boneschi, Umiliani, and Sorgini think sound knowing it will be edited, spoken over, fragmented: their writing incorporates from the start this montageable destination, turning modulation, repetition, ostinato into devices of resilience.

It is precisely this modular dimension that makes the boundary between historical library and contemporary sampling practices so porous today. It is no accident that many Italian tracks from the 1970s have been re-signified in hip-hop, electronic, cinematic productions: what for catalogues was a cue for television images becomes a loop for a beat, a fragment for an ambient track, a hook for an alternative pop piece. The contemporary producer’s gesture—isolating two bars, filtering, repeating—mirrors, at a different scale, that of the period’s editor: the library was already conceived as material to lose and recover, and for this reason it lends itself with particular docility to the logic of the sample.

From this point of view, the distance between institutional avant-garde and masked avant-garde narrows further. If electroacoustic research centers have often claimed the laboratory as the central space of experimentation, the library developed a form of diffuse laboratory, less visible but perhaps more incisive on listening practices: it is there that millions of viewers learned, without knowing it, to recognize certain electronic sonorities as signals of tension, mystery, future, long before these entered the repertoire of song or “art” music. The archive of the possible worked subterraneously at the threshold of the collective ear.

To read Boneschi, Umiliani, and Sorgini as nodes of this masked avant-garde means, then, refusing the temptation of individual cult—the “hidden genius” rediscovered—in order to restore the density of a structural position. They are indeed authors with recognizable lexicons; but they are also operators within a system that allowed Italy to articulate its own electronic language within and through generalist media. It is this double belonging—to the personal laboratory and the institutional archive—that makes the library one of the most fertile places for rethinking today the very categories of avant-garde and popular.

8. Apollonian and Dionysian in the sonic laboratory

Applying the Apollonian/Dionysian axis to Italian electronic library music means, first of all, removing it from its moralistic vulgarization—order versus chaos, light versus night—and restoring it to its original function: to describe a tension internal to aesthetic form, not an ethical conflict external to the work. In The Birth of Tragedy, the Apollonian is the force that gives contour, measure, the illusion of individuality; the Dionysian is the one that dissolves forms, plunging the subject into an experience of excess, disidentification, contact with an undifferentiated ground. Transposed onto the terrain of the library, this dualism is not played out between “good” service music and “bad” experimental music, but between two logics cohabiting the same device: on the one hand taxonomy, standardization, running time; on the other the push of sound to exceed the task, to become autonomous presence, almost corporeal.

On the Apollonian side, the library appears as the sonic incarnation of a media rationality. Each track is measured, filed, inserted into a code system that defines its possible use: duration, tempo, meter, mood, suggested contexts (“crime,” “science,” “industrial,” “reportage”). The imaginary is segmented into categories, and sound must adhere to these categories with sufficient precision to be recognizable and fungible. In this sense, the composer is an Apollonian technician: he must draw clear forms, avoid ambiguity, ensure that a “chase” track does not sound like a “romantic landscape.” The studio itself—with its meters, levels, frequency graphs—is the space in which this measure is exercised: peaks are controlled, panoramas balanced, dynamics optimized for television or cinematic use that demands clarity.

And yet, precisely inside this Apollonian cage, the Dionysian works without pause. Take Boneschi: his obsession with timbre, with Moog manipulation, with saturation and modulation effects, introduces into formally “clean” tracks a quantity of micro-events that escape pure illustrative function. In Moog’s Bolero, the pulse is rigorous, but the sound carrying it is continually on the verge of deforming, overflowing: the oscillator is never perfectly stable, the filter is pushed close to the limit, reverb amplifies the impression of spillover. The listener is compelled, despite himself, to take on this excess: he does not merely “recognize” a technological bolero, but is involved in a sensory experience that is hypnotic, almost trance-like.

In Umiliani’s case, the Dionysian often takes the form of groove. In Tra scienza e fantascienza, many tracks build an impeccable balance between formal clarity and the insistent pleasure of the pattern: bass lines that pull the body, dry but irresistibly cyclical drums, keyboard figures repeating beyond what is necessary to suggest a situation. The Apollonian would want a controlled use of repetition—just enough to fix a mood—but the Dionysian pushes for that repetition to become an end in itself, to turn into a field of autonomous enjoyment. It is the logic of the dancefloor, transposed into the laboratory: the track is born to accompany images of ships and machinery, but its structure suggests a body that dances even in the absence of images. Here service music turns into music of desire.

With Sorgini, finally, the Dionysian emerges in the choice of materials that destabilize the very concept of “scene.” In Oasi nella giungla or Occulto, one is no longer dealing with simple environmental characterizations, but with true invasions of the non-human: calls, cries, noises of bodies and nature that cannot be reduced to background. The track remains formally controlled—patterns, mix, global architecture—but what inhabits it is a multiplicity of presences that constantly threatens to break the frame. The Apollonian is in the frame; the Dionysian, here, is what the frame struggles to contain. Thus a systematic uncanny is produced: the very device that should guarantee order (the library as a code for images) becomes the vehicle of sensory disorder, of an overabundance of sonic life.

This dialectic is not an accident, but the very structure of the library laboratory. The composer knows he must produce recognizable forms, but also knows that the material he works with—synthesis, tape, effects—continually tends to escape categories. Every loop can become trance, every noise can shift from detail to protagonist, every echo can transform a stable figure into something oscillating. The Apollonian and the Dionysian are not two separate states of the system, but two forces acting simultaneously: one builds the grid, the other tests its limits.

It is not difficult, at this point, to glimpse a broader implication. Italian electronic library music is not only the place where these tensions play out at the compositional level; it is also one of the channels through which they deposit themselves in the collective ear. Every time a 1970s viewer heard—without paying much attention—a “spatial,” “industrial,” “tribal” background, he experienced—attenuated, but not irrelevant—this dialectic: a surface order (recognition of the situation) and an underground shiver (attraction to timbre, rhythm, noise). The masked avant-garde mentioned earlier finds here its perceptual correlate: an education in the Dionysian passing through Apollonian devices.

In this sense, to read Boneschi, Umiliani, and Sorgini through the Apollonian/Dionysian lens is not a game of comparative erudition, but a way to bring out the philosophical density of an apparently “minor” practice. These composers work in a regime of constraint demanding form, measure, function; but it is precisely within that regime that sound, as such, insists on exceeding, on opening passages toward states of perception long neglected by official discourse on Italian music—centered on opera, song, institutional avant-garde.

9. Politics of listening and media memory

If Italian electronic library music is, in many respects, a “masked avant-garde,” the place where this mask works most effectively is everyday listening. Boneschi’s, Umiliani’s, and Sorgini’s tracks are not born to be contemplated in reverential silence, but to live as background: in a news report, an afternoon documentary, a late-night TV film, a few-second commercial. The typical listener does not know he is listening to library music, does not know the composer’s name, often could not even say afterward which music accompanied that scene. And yet, over time, this distracted listening sediments: certain timbres, rhythmic figures, harmonic blends become shared signals of “tension,” “mystery,” “modernity,” “jungle,” helping to build a collective emotional grammar.

In this sense, the library works mostly in the grey zone between attention and inattention. It is not the “foreground” music of song—listened to, memorized, hummed—nor the “second” music of the art concert, which demands concentrated listening; it is music at the margin of the perceptual field, ready to emerge only when something in it strikes: a particularly incisive bass line, an unexpected electronic effect, a percussion pattern that imprints itself in the body. The Italian media industry of the 1970s and 1980s made the library its implicit sonic lexicon: newscasts, current-affairs rubrics, in-depth programs, TV films often share the same repertoire, creating a kind of permanent déjà-entendu, an impression of familiarity extending well beyond individual formats.

The transformation of supports—from film to tape, from tape to digital, from vinyl to file—has further complicated these politics of listening. Library musics, designed to live in closed basins (RAI archives, internal catalogues of production houses), were long inaccessible to the public; only a minimal part circulated on LPs intended for the general market. With the advent of the internet, collectors’ blogs, specialized reissues, dedicated streaming platforms, this material began to reemerge, but in a radically changed context: no longer as television background, but as an object of intentional listening, often accompanied by narratives emphasizing rarity, “strangeness,” the quality of a fragment of cultural history to be recovered.

This reemergence has generated a double movement. On the one hand, it allowed a new generation of listeners to reconnect unbound sonic memories, to give name and context to musics they may already have heard as children or adolescents without being able to identify their source. On the other, it produced a new layer of mediated listening, in which the library is no longer only daily experience but also object of specialized discourse: reviews, podcasts, thematic mixes, essays discussing genealogy, relation to cinema, television, advertising. In this second life, the same track can function simultaneously as collector’s fetish, as material for DJ sets, as academic case study.

The politics of listening also involve, in this frame, the way the library is appropriated by contemporary musical production practices. Far from being a repertoire simply “quoted” out of nostalgia, many Italian tracks from the 1970s have been sampled, isolated, filtered, transformed into loops within hip-hop, electronic, pop pieces. The producer’s gesture—choosing four bars of a Sorgini track, slowing them down, loading them with low frequencies, layering a contemporary beat—constitutes listening in action: a way to make resound, in the present, the Dionysian latency those tracks already carried within themselves. Thus motifs born to accompany documentary sequences about exotic animals become the throbbing heart of club tracks; fragments of television science fiction turn into contemporary ambient beds.

Finally, one should not overlook the role that institutional archives—phonotheques, mediatheques, radio collections—are slowly assuming in this redefinition of media memory. Projects of digitization and controlled opening of historical catalogues make it possible to imagine, in the coming years, a broader and more conscious circulation of library music, not only as vinyl nostalgia but as common heritage, object of study and critical reuse. In this scenario, the question is not simply to “save” rare tracks, but to interrogate how they have contributed—and can still contribute—to shaping the forms of collective listening: the threshold between background and figure, the perception of time, the relation between sound and image.

That the library operated mainly under a regime of distracted listening does not, paradoxically, make it less influential: on the contrary, precisely its peripheral position with respect to vigilant consciousness has allowed certain sonic configurations to deposit deeply, structuring expectations, associations, perceptual automatisms. To re-listen today to Boneschi, Umiliani, and Sorgini in the foreground means, in a sense, bringing to consciousness what for a long time worked under the surface: an archive of timbral, rhythmic, emotional possibilities that accompanied Italy’s entry into the era of mass media.

10. Toward a lateral criticism of Italian music

Seen from this angle, Italian electronic library music imposes itself as one of the most significant blind spots in the national narrative of late-twentieth-century music. The canon, as built by manuals, official histories, popularization, continues to revolve around three poles: opera (as great historical tradition), song (as the country’s affective language), institutional avant-garde (as the recognized laboratory of the new). Everything that does not fall within these three axes tends to remain peripheral, relegated to a footnote, when not simply removed. The library, and in particular its electronic side, throws this tripartition into crisis: it is music that is neither stage nor concert repertoire, and yet it has been one of the main vectors through which Italy learned to listen to the technological modern.

To take Boneschi, Umiliani, and Sorgini seriously—not as curious exceptions but as symptoms—implies restructuring the field. It means recognizing that sonic modernity was not played out only in “new music” festivals or singer-songwriter songs, but also in broadcasters’ corridors, editing rooms, TV production control rooms, where library catalogues were leafed through and tracks chosen with the same naturalness with which today one selects a preset on a digital platform. It is there that the electronic, futurible, “wild” vocabulary of these composers began to circulate capillarily, to sediment in forms of collective listening that criticism struggled to thematize precisely because they were not reducible to strong authorial figures.

A lateral criticism of Italian music should therefore shift its gaze from works to infrastructures: from celebrated records to anonymous catalogue series, from concerts to audiovisual editing practices, from big names to the sound workers who populated recording studios and phonotheques. In this movement, the library is not the only object to recover, but it is an exemplary case, for at least three reasons. First, because it forces one to think music not as an end but as a means—and yet, as we have seen, a means that develops an excess autonomy. Second, because it explicitly brings into play the question of seriality and the archive, so central to understanding contemporary cultural forms. Third, because it materially embodies the tension between Apollonian and Dionysian: between a device of control and a sonic flow that exceeds it.

From this perspective, the analysis conducted on Boneschi, Umiliani, and Sorgini can be read as a kind of operative model. It is not a matter of canonizing three more names, but of showing how a criticism that intersects media history, timbral analysis, aesthetic theory can make visible what a linear history—author, work, public—tends to leave at the margins. The same method could be extended to other sound funds: RAI archives, municipal music libraries, private collections of sonifications, catalogues of publishers now disappeared. In all these places there is preserved, in the form of tapes, promotional LPs, paper sheets, a sonic memory that has not yet found an adequate narrative.

Finally, to interrogate the library today also means confronting its contemporary reverberations. Digital circulation, archive-opening projects, the ever more conscious use of sampling in pop and electronic fields mean that these materials are no longer only objects of historical study, but true actors of the present. Every time a fragment of Boneschi or Sorgini is grafted into a contemporary production, a temporal short circuit occurs: the sonic laboratory of the 1970s returns to reverberate within a radically transformed media landscape, continuing to problematize—perhaps in other forms—the same knots—relationship between technology and body, between function and excess, between order and trance—that generated it.