Giorgio Moroder

Entirely self-taught and without any musical training, Giorgio Moroder became one of the great architects of disco music (and its offshoots), as well as one of the most influential Italian composers in the history of pop.

It's a long story, that of this artist from Val Gardena, one that moved through various phases: the first, and perhaps most important, begins with his move to Germany towards the end of the Sixties. It's there that he had his first encounters with all those musical echoes, tinged with Kraftwerk and with electronic music still in its embryonic stage, which were laying the groundwork for so-called krautrock. It was in this huge melting pot of sounds that Moroder, a bass player at the time, first came across a strange, gleaming object: the synthesizer, still an elite plaything in those years.

He himself recounted how it happened: "In 1970 I was in Munich, and an engineer I knew named Robbie introduced me to a classical composer who had this incredible new instrument. It was a big machine with electric cables everywhere, and he played me a composition that consisted of a low tone repeating and changing every half minute. That was his composition! He was basically using that huge machine to create what was then called 'musique concrète'. There were no rhythms, no effects, and it wasn't all that interesting, but afterwards, when the composer wasn't around anymore, Robbie took me aside and said: 'Look, with this machine you can create a lot more than just a single note'. So he sat at the synthesizer and showed me a couple of things, and I thought: 'Wow! This is fantastic!' I was immediately fascinated by the possibilities and the different kinds of sounds it could produce".

And it's from anecdotes like this one that the artist's sonic intuitions were born, shaping his future work. The entirely seventies partnership between Moroder and Donna Summer (whom he himself discovered), which culminated in the creation of landmark tracks, already marked a fundamental shift in a certain kind of music of that era. The track "Love To Love You Baby" (1975) blended Summer's soul spirit with Moroder's electro-pop, sparking the rise of the 12-inch format; the even more historic "I Feel Love" (1976) essentially laid the foundations for synth-pop and disco music in general, particularly its electronic strain.

For this reason, Moroder must be considered the originator of a genre, the creator of atmospheres that have since become deeply familiar. And his was often a solitary adventure. His version of disco, in fact, isn't really a child of funk — it might capture a bit of it from a distance, but it doesn't look to Curtis Mayfield or Marvin Gaye, nor does it walk hand in hand with the Bee Gees or Earth Wind & Fire. Perhaps his collaboration with Donna Summer comes closer to the exploits of the other "queen" of that era, Gloria Gaynor, but even so, "I Feel Love" already throws up a wall between the two genres. Because at that time Moroder was breathing different rhythms, made of drum machines and electro-dance. In his head was an immense, wildly varied musical cauldron that simply wanted to reach an overall harmony: the work of Kraftwerk, synthesizer voices, the influences of the European avant-garde, but also the American and Latin melodies and rhythms of the period. In short, our hero tried to calibrate electronic music just enough to blend experimentation with accessibility.

These are the ingredients that make Moroder a landmark artist, revisited and idolized by the most disparate figures, even decades after that period (Dj Shadow, Outkast). There must be a reason, after all, why even Daft Punk sampled his "The Chase" during their live set at the Rex Club in Paris. And the reason is simply this: his late-Seventies work ("From Here To Eternity" above all) is innovative, propulsive and electronically luscious.

"From Here To Eternity", credited simply to "Giorgio", runs about thirty minutes and races along like a train from start to finish. It's made up of eight tracks, eight little pop-metallic suites with punchy, decisive basslines and surprising melodic vocal openings.

From the very first, title track, the elements of his music are already clear: a rigorous 4/4 structure in which, on every quarter note, the same bass ostinato moves to a different pitch before starting over. Gusts of synth open up decadent, evocative background atmospheres, alternating with the sharp, ringing keyboards of the main theme. The basses are dry and muted, and the off-beat "claps" tower over the on-beat "booms". Everything is then blended with electronic filler effects that pile up in progression.

The melodic line is carried by the voice, often electronically filtered, following the interplay of the basses and behaving exactly like another instrument. There's no shortage of "soul & black"-style female voices backing up the rhythm, very much in Donna Summer fashion. First love, after all, is never forgotten.

So landmark tracks like "Too Hot To Handle", where you can pick up on the "Latin" element of his music, alternate with Kraftwerk-esque pieces like "Utopia – Me Giorgio", sped up just the right amount; then the decadent, John Foxx-style atmospheres — but more powerful — of "Lost Angeles" take turns with the robot-funk of "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone"; and finally worth mentioning is the crystalline, progressively building melody of "First Hand Experience in Second Hand Love", and his most famous track, wildly propulsive, danceable for hours on end: "From Here To Eternity" itself, which slinks mischievously through the bright neon lights of those years, with their already hedonistic allure.

The melodies of these tracks really grab you — the ear listens, and the foot starts moving.

The lyrics, in strict English, are a mere formality: they might hint at love affairs or nightlife, and frankly that matters little to us. No one, after all, wants to draw a comparison between our Giorgio and Bob Dylan. It's the musical element that keeps surprising us instead: Moroder's inventions are as simple as they are captivating, and already point toward much of Eighties synth-pop, and partly toward early-Nineties club techno. Certainly a must for all the electronic music yet to come. It's no coincidence that the album's title almost seems to say: "Ok, it all starts here, but damn it, it's going to keep going! For years and years, all the way... to eternity!"

Worth remembering that the Giorgio Moroder of the late Seventies was very skilled at playing his own character: sunglasses and a Zappa-esque mustache fit for the dancefloor. Any video from that era shows him surrounded by his synths, his knobs, immersed in those famous tangles of cables, as if at the controls of a spaceship, with dancers in shimmering jumpsuits all around him. Some have called his music disco-trash, others italo-disco, and that matters little to us. Maybe he mixed a bit of Klaus Schulze with Tomas Milian, but he was always a gentleman of the seven notes. His musical legacy remains enormous, both for his pioneering work in the Seventies and for his later productions. Moroder, among other things, composed soundtracks for films that, in their own way, made history ("Top Gun", "Midnight Express", "Flashdance", "American Gigolo", "Scarface"), as well as the official themes for the 1984 Los Angeles and 1988 Seoul Olympics. A treasure to be preserved, from here to eternity.

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16/05/2008