An Italian Music Scene: “Afro/Cosmic”
In the spring of 1994, I moved to Italy. I was 23 years old and was working as a dancer in nightclubs in Rimini and Riccione on the Adriatic coast. I noticed straight away there was a unique sound and mixing technique of the Italian DJs I came across. I started asking about it, and time and time again, stories of these mysterious Afro and Cosmic scenes were recounted. But, curiously, this story wasn’t known in the english speaking music press at all. In fact, I was met with flat denials by UK journalists that a scene could exist that they, the english speaking music press, didn’t already know about.
How could a whole music and club scene in Europe from the mid 70s, and an influential one at that, have flown under the radar with not a word written about it anywhere?
I pitched an article idea to The Face magazine in 1994 and was turned down with a thanks but no thanks. It took me until 2002 to get the article out in the now defunct 7 Magazine. Once the article was out in english, the genie was then out of the box. My article was photocopied and circulated on forums. People started hunting down the numbered mix-tapes and seeking out the talented innovators behind the scenes.
Last week, I went to the opening night of Radical Disco at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, an exhibition celebrating architecture and nightlife in Italy from 1965–1975. On the decks, was font of all DJ history knowledge, Bill Brewster playing a Cosmic Set. It felt like the circle was now complete!
Here’s my article for 7 Magazine from 2002.
Afro Cosmic
The Cosmic Afro scene developed at the tail end of disco by a group of DJs in and around Rimini. Through unique mixing techniques, extreme EQing and plundering diverse genres of music they produced an eclectic tribal journey into sound and rhythm. In this provincial area of the country the DJ became the creator for the first time. The era was pre house. Paradise Garage and Studio 54 had just opened in New York, Northern Soul was taking off big style in the UK and Bambaata and Grand Master Flash were making their own experiments in the Bronx. Cosmic Afro was and remains today to be the only music genre that was 100% homegrown without outside influence. It would be 10 years before Nicky Holloway and Paul Oakenfold would make that holiday to Ibiza and come back and create the myth that House was imported into Europe from Ibiza in ’88. “When Ibiza blew up,” commented Claudio Coccoluto, Italy’s best known super-DJ, “we thought it was really commercial.” In fact, it’s a little documented fact that a lot of the DJs in Ibiza at the time were Italian, hailing from their own, by then established, dance music scene.
Back to 2002, weaving down a gravel track on the way to the middle of nowhere in central Italy on a what could be a wild goose chase to track down the founders of a unique electronic dance music movement that most the world doesn’t know about, a mixtape from 1980 clicked onto play on the car stereo. Space age Funk, electronic bleeps, African percussion, Samba, twisted Disco, seamlessly mixed and continuously warped with EQ emerged. It didn’t fit with any preconceived idea of Italian music.
There are a lot of foggy memories, but everyone agrees it all started at a club called the Baia degli Angeli (Bay of Angels) with two New Yorkers, Bob and Tom. The Baia first opened in 1974. Millionaire jet setter, Gian Carlo Tirotti, unusually for an Italian, travelled the world moving through exclusive circles of beautiful people. He returned to Italy to build his dream on the top of a hill overlooking a bay on the Adriatic Riviera. Constructed over different levels, terraces with panoramic views of the bay, swimming pools, internal and external dance floors, the club was more of an immense sprawling luxury villa complex than what would be thought of as a nightclub today. From a distance the shifting lights could be seen operated from the cabin of a mechanical crane, picking out the dancefloors below. There was only one DJ console, housed in a four storey, fully functional glass lift, enabling the DJ to move between the dancefloors at will. While other clubs were open until 2am, the Baia was the first club in to close at 7am with the sunrise. The club was already a myth before it opened, strange graphics of the infamous angels had appeared all over town with no explanation. The club opened and was a massive success. It was Italy’s venue of the moment and anyone who was anyone had to be there.
Tirotti imported Bob and Tom (Bob Day and Tom Sison) as residents. Their impact on Italian club culture is the stuff of myth and legend. Some say they were from Studio 54, some say they were glass collectors even gay sailors. What is true, is that they were the first DJs to mix in Italy and that they had records that no one else had. They played an exclusive selection of Philedelphia Soul, Funk and Disco. The designer Elio Fiorucci, at the time was at the centre of New York’s jet set was a regular complete with entourage of beautiful people. During their residency, Bob and Tom made a point of inviting a number of young, local aspiring DJs to the Baia to be schooled in the secret art of mixing.
When in 1977 Tirotti moved on, Bob and Tom disappeared from the club scene never to be heard of again. Before leaving, they suggested to the new owner he hand things over to two of their brightest pupils, Daniele Baldelli and Mozart. This unlikely duo began a journey into unchartered territory. The great adventure began.
Claudio Rispoli aka Mozart because of his classical music training, had been living at the Baia since the age of 16, leaving in the evenings to DJ locally and returning to sleep every night at the club. He spent his days hanging out with the owner and his entourage, living a life of excess. He became famed for his improvisation, musicality and sense of timing and his eclectic dark Funk mixes. In later years he reached international acclaim for his productions on Irma record’s such as Double D’s ‘Found Love’ and as one third of the group Jestofunk incorporating the talents of CeCe Rogers for ‘Say it Again’ (93) and ‘Can We Live’ (95) and. Back in 1977, however, Mozart, was busy being the wild child of the Adriatic DJ set and was about to be thrown together with an unlikely partner.
Daniele Baldelli, who’d been DJing since 1968 was a geek, technical perfectionist and an avid record collector, searching for the funk in the electronic end of the music spectrum. Bob and Tom had picked him out too while he was DJing in a small club.
At the Baia Mozart and Baldelli began using records to create a new sound, forging Disco, Funk and electronica into something new. They managed to beat mixed different genres of music with imprecise tempos, quickly moving on from the upbeat elitism of happy disco music and turned it into something darker and edgier.
When, in 1980, Baldelli saw an advert for the new Technics SP15 quartz turntables, he knew they were what he’d been waiting for. Not only would they allow him to precisely orchestrate his set in advance they would also solve the problem of skipping needles from going up and down in the lift between the dancefloors.
They started to travel long distances in search of new beats and sounds. DJ shops with a convenient selection of playable tracks and listening facilities didn’t exist. They hunted down specific sounds and tempo, plundering all genres of music, buying boxes of sealed records on a hunch that there would be something, no matter how small that they could use. The regular turntables of the day were Thorrens and could only go to +/- 3. Baldelli’s SP15s would go to +/- 10, giving them far greater scope producing a new hybrid sound which was taken even further by them playing tracks at the wrong speed, making them almost unrecognisable.
Within a short time, a phenomenon exploded. By 1978 there had been a cultural shift of seismic proportions and the Baia was the epicentre of the storm. It was now a completely different place to when Bob and Tom were in charge. There had been a change of drugs and public that had produced a new chemistry bringing in a new beat. Instead of Cocaine it was hash and poppers, instead of designer labels it was second hand vintage. Through mixtapes the word spread and the Baia became a mecca for a new generation of Italians, thousands began to make the pilgrimage. The crowd formed a new tribe. The second hand clothes were as sought after as the DJs hunted down the music. Shops such as Gerard, which is still open today, in Florence, became famed for their selection of military and second hand. And like many changes in fashion it too had it’s curiosities: “At one point white clogs were in fashion. They took them to the cobbler and got the heels filed down so the toes would point up! The jeans were tight at the ankle and short so you could see the socks.” remembers Luca Benini, now owner of the streetwear label Slam Jam, then regular clubber at the Baia. The customised Citroen DS and 2CV’s filled the car park, packing super hi-fi systems and plastered with adhesives had become official mascots for the scene.
The situation soon got out of control. The Baia packed in up to 4000 people, and thous ands would be left outside unable to get in. Not that it mattered. Just being there was all that was important. Being an open-air club they could still hear the music as they hung out on the surrounding hill and the consumption of illicit substances increased. The authorities decided to take the matter into hand. In August 1978, the military police violently stormed the waiting crowds camped outside the club and the Baia was shut down. It was too late, the virus had escaped and gone on to contaminate much of northern Italy.
The word had spread, fuelled by mixtapes. “I got hold of Mozart and Baldelli’s mixtapes and they totally blew me away. They weren’t playing records; they were creating music, which is totally different. I couldn’t find the records, they didn’t exist.” Recalls Coccoluto just back off the plane from a weekend playing in Ibiza. “It’s so disappointing, the international DJ community that find themselves in incredible venues on a beautiful island and all they do is play their safest most anonymous sets ever.” He went on to lament. A far cry from the scene he sites as being the reason he started DJing in the first place. Coccoluto didn’t go to the Baia from his native southern Italy, At the time, he says he wasn’t into disco music at all; instead electronic music was the sound that inspired him. “After hearing the tapes I headed straight to the instrument shops and tried to work out how they’d produced the sounds”. Research and the concept of encapsulating diverse musical genres into a format is something that has stayed with him ever since and formed the basis of his most well known 1996 production, ‘Belo Horizonti’ which sampled “Arito Moreira’s “Celebration Suite” a classic Latin track from the Afro/Cosmic scene. “How they [the DJs] played it directly inspired my own production.
Following in Mozart and Baldelli’s footsteps, new DJs began springing up, developing new strains of the genre. Ebreo and Spranga were ethnic and tribal, Mozart and Rubens journeyed further into Jazz Funk and Afro Beat, Fabrizio Fattori went into Brazillian but it was Baldelli and new partner TBC that took the electronic route even further at a new club called Cosmic at Lake Garda, northern Italy in 1979. The club was designed as a ‘dance gymnasium’ and comprised of a space age dancefloor, no seating and was alcohol free. It was intended to be a cultural experience where people came to dance, lost in sound. Baldelli experimented with changing speeds of records, dropping artists as wide and varied as Klaus Shultze, Moebius, Kraftwerk, Yello, Airto Moriera, Fela Kuti, Manu Dibango, Weather Report, Kool and the Gang and Funkadelic into their sets. It was here that the word first spread outside of Italy. German and Austrian holidaymakers copied the sound and took it home with them. Cosmic Afro events are held to this day are in Italy, southern Germany and Austria, a far cry however from the original spirit, style, innovation and magic of its origins.
Wherever this new pack of superstar DJs played chaos was close behind. “I had a habit of closing clubs wherever I went,” recalls Mozart from his home in the middle of the lush countryside. “Locals spray painted “Mozart go home!” on walls when I played somewhere,” infuriated by the invasion. Thousands would turn up for to a 500 capacity club in the middle of nowhere, and those left outside would remain hanging around taking drugs. At the same time heroin entered the scene and caught up a lot of the DJs with it on a massive scale. The odd one out, Baldelli remembers “I ended up telling people I was sorted, so they’d leave me alone. At the time it wasn’t cool to be not doing drugs.” Things got negative and started to implode. The combination of massive crowds and smack, led to the inevitable crack down by the police and within 12 months virtually every club in the scene was closed.
After the clubs were no longer an option, the scene moved to holding large Cosmic Afro gatherings where all of the DJs from the scene would attract crowds of up to 12,000 in improvised venues in sport stadiums and fields. By then Italy was in full swing of a hippy revival the scene had come to resemble more Woodstock than a club culture.
One of the most curious aspects to the phenomena is that the impact and importance of this scene has gone unrecognised and unreported. With the arrival the international DJ circuit. DJs such as Ricky Montanari, Flavio Vecchi and Claudio Coccoluto passed on the tapes from the bygone era surprised international DJs. No one bothered to contact the original DJs, in the production-fuelled era it didn’t make commercial sense. There was nothing to sell; they didn’t produce records, just mixtapes.
Has the scene been influential? Traces of the scene are there if you know how to recognise it. The 1989classic house track ‘Sueno Latino’ is unmistakably a child of the Afro scene, a re-work of Manuel Gottsching’s ‘E2-E4’, another Cosmic Afro classic.
New York’s West End Record’s Andy Reynold’s says “Over here we were really into the Italian electronic stuff in the early 80s, stuff like Alexander Robotnik were filling up the Chicago and New York DJs sets.” Italy’s DJs today, renowned for their mixing skills and particular style credited this to their heritage of Cosmic Afro. Listening to DJ Harvey’s Black Cock series and the Idjut Boys’ cut up tape releases on their Noid imprint also instantly strike a chord. Maybe it’s no coincidence that Italian DJ, Leo Young, seeded the tapes to a few London based DJs and producers in the mid nineties. “Leo brought me this Cosmic tape of Baldelli’s to listen to and I thought it was technically amazing,” recalls Faze Action’s Simon Lee “that kind of music is really hard to mix, especially considering the date it was from 1979.” On whether it influenced him, “ Yeah, I would say so. When we made ‘Kariba’ at the time I was listening more to Fela Kuti and Leo had given me the tape.”
The tapes were nearly 20 years old by the time this new audience heard them for the first time. Since the early 90s on, Italy has been exporting house and techno, yet this earlier scene has remained it’s best kept secret. Listening to their mixes today it’s easy to be complacent. We’ve been exposed for over a decade to the idea of eclectism on the dance floor by clubs such as Dingwalls in London, as a viable alternative from four to the floor. What happened in Italy twenty years ago was something completely different; the part they were missing was the music industry machine that has brought so many English speaking artists to instant fame and notoriety. The Cosmic Afro DJs’ approach to acoustics created a new concept of electronic music that coupled with the introduction of drum machines, analogical keyboards and sequencers created a new sound. We’ve all seen live percussion introduced in DJ sets but it is a fairly recent innovation in the grand scale of dance music culture. To really understand what it was all about you have to turn to the tapes. Listening to Fela Kuti’s “Sorrow Tears and Blood” played end to end won’t give you the answer, you have to listen to how they played it.
To really understand the impact it had on a generation of Italian kids, you would have to wipe your memory of musical experiences and return in a time capsule to Rimini in 1979. Failing that, go hunting for the tapes. They are around if you go looking. Just ask an Italian.
For proof on how amazing these guys were at mixing impossible disco tracks. Here’s Mozart in 1979 at Baia Degli Angeli.
Many thanks to:
Liam J. Nabb
Daniele Baldelli
Mozart
TBC
Claudio Coccoluto
Flavio Vecchi
Luca Benini
Fabio (Disco Inn)
DJ Miki
