Italian library music has spawned all manner of obscure wondrous over the top under appreciated musical geniuses, but few are as mind bogglingly good, or mind bogglingly strange as Teisco or Rimauri, or Marco Melchiori as he’ known to his mother.
This is outsider music, or perhaps bedroom music, playing fast and loose with genres. There’ a cosmic synth bent, where strange wigged out electrics alternatively drone and oscillate, the texture constantly shifting, and then there are these little lofi electro guitar jigs. Teisco effortlessly mixes the brooding and jaunty and his amalgam of worlds, moods, and undefined genres just serves to add to the mystery of the man. Some pieces here sound like the less lush but squelchier from French band Air (created of course before they even existed), at other times its electro pop with vocoded vocals and rudimentary drum machines, and others like strange electronic sound design. It’s never dull, yet there’ something simultaneously erratic and compelling about it all, a certain looseness that is also its genius. In fact there’ is nothing Teisco could do to surprise you, he keeps his options open. Whilst we know Italian library was a great place for renowned composers to earn some quick cash (often under a pseudonym), the music is normally a little more funk or groove orientated or at the very least coherent. This is not library music as we’ve commonly known it, and unless you were making a psychedelic space western, it’s difficult to comprehend what it was used for.
This collection is not an album per se; rather it’s compiled from 3 albums recorded between 1979 and 1982. Teisco is best known for his Tuscan Castle & Country Seat, recorded in the 70′ though recently reissued. It’s an album that is similarly all over the shop, referred to in this albums liner notes as “the brutal energy of the Velvet Underground, the mantric rhythms of the best krautrock, the loose as goose electronics splatter of the best undergrounds cosmic sides and the wild energy that any proto punk side could muster.†In other words it’s weird as hell but it hits all the right marks. Not unlike Musiche De Teisco. It’s lofi electro folk with a healthy cosmic electro sensibility. You get the sense though that Teisco was operating far out on his own, following his own idiosyncratic path and caring little about what was happening around him.
Musiche De Teisco is a prime example of why reissue labels should exist. Teisco is such a freak oddity that he needs to move beyond the exclusive realm of crate diggers and be appreciated by a wider audience. Dual Planet have typically gone to town with not just a vinyl release but a gatefold sleeve and extensive liner notes. Their greatest act of kindness however is releasing this monster in the first place and shining a light on another purveyor of obscure musical genius that we never previously knew existed.
