While Bava undoubtedly wanted to repeat Dario Argento’s winning formula, tracks such as the discordant ‘La Cantina’ might be even more eerie than anything you’d find bothering the Profondo Rosso OST. Drummer Walter Martino had performed with the Italian horror heavyweights in 1975, and while he’s uncredited on the album’s liner notes, long-standing Goblin keyboardist Maurizio Guarani actually drops a few of his signature stabs too. Libra’s proggy accompaniment to Mario Bava’s Schock is one of the best of ‘em, and it probably won’t come as a surprise to hear that the band were actually only a degree of separation away from Goblin. Goblin might (quite rightly) get most of the attention when the conversation zeroes in on Italian horror soundtracks, but there are plenty more gems out there if you care to take a closer look. Not sure what she’d make of Justice Yeldham, though. The Glass World of Anna Lockwood presents compositions in a similar vein: the results are gorgeous and otherworldly, and herald a decade characterised by curiosity and miscegenation. Installed in dark rooms with a modest light display in tow, the New Zealander rubbed and struck an array of different glass vessels (bottles, jars, tubes) and panels, extracting coos and yelps from these inanimate objects – a sort of double-glazed siren song. We’ll be unveiling these day-by-day in tandem with the list:Īmongst a particular cadre of experimental musicians and field recordists, Anna – or, as she was subsequently credited, Annea – Lockwood’s glass concerts of the late 1960s and early 1970s are the stuff of legend. To accompany the list, our team have curated and recorded five mixes, featuring material from all the records on the rundown. We’ll be counting down the list all this week – twenty per day, finishing up on Friday. Rather, these are 100 records we simply couldn’t live without – records that have shaped our collections, our favourite artists’ collections and, in ways big and small, the development of popular music in the late 20th century. As ever, this is not some hoary retelling of The Canon™, nor is it a beardier-than-thou list for contrarians and Discogs gollums. It’s a decade of strange combinations, of unlikely correspondences and (to reference one album on the rundown) chance meetings – some disastrous, some very auspicious indeed.Īs with previous lists, we’ve sought to represent the period in all its diversity.
More than anything, though, this was popular music’s Cambrian period: a melting pot from which vital new forms (hip-hop, house, post-punk) would already be emerging by the end of the decade. Prog gazed upwards, New Age looked inwards, metal plumbed the depths – and the Germans released a lot of great records. Electronic music left the academies and the novelty charts and started to infect rock and pop wholesale. Looking at the evidence, it’s hard to argue: this is the decade that brought us fusion’s high noon, ten summers of disco, the rise of the dub cosmonauts, ambient’s first stirrings, and the viperous bite of punk. “Ah”, said a wise old former FACT staffer about this list, “possibly the best decade of them all?” Like this? Check out FACT’s rundowns of the 100 Best Albums of the 1990s and the 100 Best Albums of the 1980s.
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