Italian dance

While I've been aware of a few of their works for a while, I only recently really dug into the many, many projects (over 50 different artist/band names) of Francesco Scandolari and Lorenzo Carpella.  And that number is just the groups that the two of them are in and nobody else; if you start creating additional permutations of where they're working with someone else, either the two of them together or just one of them, you get at least 50% more.

It's curious; these two are from Milan.  Northern Italy is culturally very distinct from Southern Italy, for those who don't know.  A hundred years after the Revolutionary War in America, what we see today as some iconic European countries—Germany and Italy, in particular—were actually just forming for the first time, and not always comfortably.  (Technically, Italy wasn't completely united politically until after World War I. But culturally and in other ways, they still aren't.)  Southern Italians are very Mediterranean in both culture and genetics, whereas northern Italians have been strongly influenced by the depopulation that occurred at the end of the Roman Empire.  Always a haven for non-Italian populations (Etruscans, Cis-Alpine Gauls) it was largely repopulated by Migration Era Germanic peoples like the Goths and the Lombards, and politically was often allied with either France or Austria until the Risorgimiento. Even today, they are often more like Italian-speaking Swiss, Austrians or Bavarians then they are like Sicilians or Calabrians. And although today, most speak standard Italian, this is a matter more of social expediency; prior to the Risorgimiento, northern Italian languages were a totally different branch of the Romance language family tree (Gallo-Italic) from the central and southern branches (Italo-Dalmatian).  The Southern Question relates to the Imperialistic imposition of a northern Italian Hajnal Line culture and economic system over a southern social and economic climate that was based on Big Men and which tolerated, if not actively encouraged, tribalistic organized crime syndicates and general corruption.  The unification was also a disaster economically for the backwards citizens of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which prompted a massive diaspora of southern Italians in particular to places like America and Argentina, where in many cases, they brought their corruption and organized crime with them—infamously.

After the Italian unification, Massimo d'Azeglio famously said, "L'Italia è fatta. Restano da fare gli italiani."  This is usually translated as, "We have made Italy.  Now we must make Italians."  Heh.

Anyway, this cultural distinction plays out in interesting ways.  During the late 70s up through the early 80s, there was a distinctive north Italian genre of dance music, for instance, called Italo-Disco (a name given to it by German record labels who were trying to market the stuff more widely on the Continent, actually) which was kind of a synthesizer garage band type of thing.  The north Italians have continued this localized dance music tradition for a long time, although Italo-Disco ended up being popular enough on the Continent to spawn the creation of various genres of dance-pop electronic music, like Eurobeat, Eurodance, Italodance, and more, and it played no doubt a very strong role in the development of Euro-House, even though most of the artists of that movement weren't Italians.

The north Italians—like Scandolari and Carpella—but also like big name dance music producers like Technoboy, Tuneboy, Luca Antolini, Mauro Picotto, Benny Benassi, or heck, even Giorgio Moroder before that, all belong to this same tradition, even though the music has turned into rave music.  As I've been exploring the worlds of hard trance, hardstyle, and other closely related subgenres of EDM, I've been shocked by how much material by northern Italians I've picked up; probably more than by any other region.  Sure, Germany is a hotspot of hard trance, the Netherlands one for hardstyle, and I've got a lot of material that builds on the acid tradition of Great Britain or the diaspora Anglo-phone traditions (apparently Australia is now the world's foremost hotspot for hard trance, specifically Melbourne)  I've got a surprising number of Swiss tracks.  But the northern Italians almost certainly top the numbers by sheer volume.  Not only are there tons of artists and groups, and many of them cross-pollinate and collaborate with each other, but they all seem to be just shocking prolific, turning out more vinyls in a year than I can imagine, during the heyday of their movement.

Which, let's be clear, is over now.  Hardtrance is still around, but much more dispersed.  Hardstyle seems to have peaked and faded.  I don't know what the hot genres for EDM are anymore, nor do I really care, I suppose.  Maybe there isn't such a thing as hot genres anymore.  This was always sufficiently underground that little indie labels were the thing; now localized self-released and sold as mp3s, or FLACs or wav files on the internet seems to maybe the the thing.  I dunno.

But at one point from the late 90s to about the late 00s or maybe a little longer, the sheer number of hard dance tracks coming out of northern Italy was truly immense.  It's really made me feel a sense of community that I didn't before with the northern Italians, and research more intensely their history and their ethnogenesis, and who they were, and look for connections.  There aren't really a lot; my ancestry is almost totally English and Scottish with just a touch (1/8) of Portuguese from a random guy who married into the family a little over a hundred years ago.  None of that connects me very closely to anything happening in Italy; at best, they're a slightly more distant cousin group to me than the Bavarians, and from a similar source, connected to me through the distant Anglo-Saxon connections to those same peoples from before they crossed the channel at the invitation of Vortigern.

Ah, well.  Regardless of the existence (or not, in this case) of close genetic ties, I still have to admit that our shared European Hajnal Line heritage is sufficient for me to feel a sense of kinship with them anyway, and the fact that they make really good music that I like certainly doesn't hurt.

As an aside; I've mentioned this before, but I'm amused to see how often they remix their own work, but credit it to one of their other aliases.  There's one song in particular, a cover song called "Kernkraft 400" done by the "band" Tweetwoof.  The single (well, the 2006 re-release anyway) has four versions on it, two of which were on the original 2003 release—remixes by Digimind, DJ Kubrik, Schwarzende and Skam.  However—all four of those remixers are actually aliases of the same team of two guys who make up Tweetwoof itself.  Arguably, those four names—along with, I dunno, Mental Miracle, Omega Nine and Tronik, are the most well-known of those aliases, so maybe they're just trying to market their brands as best they can, but I still find the whole affair kinda amusing.