Back catalogue: Leftfield

Review: Illuminating the remarkable, and largely otherwise undocumented, creative ferment within and between the British and American scenes of experimental music during the mid to late 1970s, Dialogo's box set - made in full collaboration with all of the composers or their estates - contains the entire ten album output of the label, completely remastered and housed in faithful mini-replicas of their original covers and liner notes, as well as an extensive booklet. Over the last few years, the Italian imprint has showed a remarkable dedication to the history of experimental music via reissues of seminal artefacts from the Cramps catalog, and important albums by Piero Umiliani, Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai, Enrico Rava, and others. This initiative now takes on a towering scale with the first ever box set gathering the entire ten album collection of Brian Eno's Obscure Records, originally issued between 1975 and 1978. A truly groundbreaking body of recordings - many of which have remained out of print and difficult to find for decades - it contains some of the most important, influential, and enduring music to emerge during the second half of the 20th Century, which collectively reconfigured the terms of Minimalism and laid the groundwork for the emerging movement of Ambient music over its short, three year run.

Review: RECOMMENDED
Ennio Morricone's legacy is well known across the world, or at least the world of cinephiles. The legendary film composer is responsible or no less than 400 movie and TV scores (in fact, he's made a few more), with a 100-strong oeuvre of classical compositions to add to that storied back catalogue. Sadly lost last year at the age of 91- unrelated to coronavirus - much of his work is now rightfully returning to the release schedule.

Of course, none of his output can match the music he created to accompany Spaghetti Westerns - Italian made cowboy movies from directors such as another late-great, Sergio Leone, including The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and A Fistful of Dollars. 134 of the finest arrangements from that part of his life are included on this mammoth collector's item, which proves you don't really need visuals to be transported to the wild frontier towns of yesterday.