Spaghetti Western Music

This 2nd album from the TarantinosNYC features 2 tracks from Tarantino's latest, Django Unchained, and 2 from Pulp Fiction. Also features a collection of soundtrack favorites from 60s and 70s surf, soul, spy and spaghetti western films and 6 originals! Surfin' the Silver Screen is another exploration of great soundtrack material, as might have been curated by Quentin Tarantino. We include two tracks from the classic Pulp Fiction, Bullwinkle Part II and Son of a Preacher Man, which is arranged in Booker T & the MG's style. We also have two tracks from the latest QT masterpiece, Django Unchained. First is the theme from the original spaghetti western Django and the second is Lo Chiamavano King.

The Spaghetti Epic: Six Modern Рrog Bands For Six '70 Рrog Suites (2004). Musea and Finnish magazine Colossus have come up trumps with their 'Six Modern Prog Bands For Six '70 Prog Suites' idea. Two and quarter hours of quality music and a booklet that has to be seen to be believed (including a documented story of the film, illustrated story boards and various photographs). The sheer audacity of such a concept has to be applauded and encouraged, particularly as the results are so good!
Take a classic film of the genre, in this case Once Upon A Time In The West, and invite six modern prog bands to write a piece of music based on a character from the film…

With The Miraculous, Swedish singer, songwriter, and keyboardist Anna von Hausswolff has delivered an album as different from 2013's celebrated Ceremony as that was from 2010's Singing From The Grave. On Ceremony, Hausswolff discovered the sonic possibilities of the cathedral organ. Her four-octave vocal range rose above compositions that wove classically tinged Gothic art pop and skeletal post-rock that touched on Sweden's gloomy operatic and folk traditions. Sometimes gentle and dreamy, and just as often moody and droning (sometimes inside the same tune), she has created an iconoclastic brand of indie music. On The Miraculous, Hausswolff doubles down on the organ. The instrument she's using here is an enormous 9,000-pipe Acusticum Organ designed by Gerard Woehl. Its vast tonal and instrumental possibilities include sounds for glockenspiel, vibraphone, celeste, percussion, and indefinable high-pitched shrieking sounds that extend the upper reaches of the Western harmonic system (these pipes are partially submerged in water).

Undoubtedly one of the central figures of 1960s/70s Italian film music, Alessandro Alessandroni defined the very essence of the genre with his vocal group, I Cantori Moderni. Renowned for his pioneering reverb guitar sound, sitar exploration and a phenomenal whistling technique, (Perhaps best known for his contribution in shaping the famous ‘Spaghetti Western’ sound) Alessandroni’s vast and innovative contribution to Italian soundtracks is unparalleled. Recording countless sessions for many Italian film composers of the period including Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai, Piero Umiliani and Francesco De Masi (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, All the Colours Of The Dark, Sweden: Heaven and Hell and Alla Scoperta Dell’India respectively), his importance as a sideman often overshadowed his own work as a solo artist. Complementing his session work, Alessandroni was an amazingly inventive composer in his own right; his unique compositions were issued on many Italian, French, and German Library labels throughout the 1970s.

This two-disc anthology assembled by Mike Patton is, after the spaghetti Western soundtracks and themes, essential Morricone. Never has his music from the strange films he scored in the 1960s and '70s been showcased in such an original and powerful way. Patton has looked closely into the experimental nature of the maestro and found plenty here to offer as well as to crow about. Many of the scores he chose from would be known only to cineastes of minor and obscure Italian films. Yet, Patton understood that Morricone loved his own process and treated crime and exploitation flicks like L'Anticristo and Forza G with the same delightful sense of adventure that he approached The Godfather and The Mission with. Here, all manner of strangeness is on offer: from psychedelic guitars and tripped-out wordless vocals to sitars, layers and layers of percussion, acid-drenched strings, an Echoplexed celeste, toy pianos, psychotic operatic voices in chorus, and more.

As modern big-band leaders go, Quincy Jones in the '60s would be first choice for many composers who wrote for a television series or the cinema. Though not the original themes, Jones was quite able to produce a full album featuring Henry Mancini's famous songs from movies and the small screen. This collection of the familiar and obscure Mancini done in 1964, preceded famed epic scores written by Jones from films The Pawnbroker and The Deadly Affair. It comprises several well-known hit tunes and a smattering of cuts not easily identifiable as the hummable and memorable Mancini classics…