Among the most important figures in 20th century Italian music, Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai each forged distinct and unexpected creative paths that were entirely tuned to the eras through which they worked; radical and forward thinking composers, who activated vast new worlds of possibility via the mediums of film and television. Morricone has long held legendary status for his soundtrack and library music work, as well as his explicitly avant-garde and experimental endeavors within the seminal collective, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, but Dimensioni Sonore - a sprawling body of recordings originally issued by RCA in 1972 - holds equal distinction as a historically prescient illumination into the slightly lesser known efforts of Nicolai, and the groundbreaking importance of his work.
Almost entirely distinct in scale and content, Dimensioni Sonore towers in the history of library music; the intriguing and idiosyncratic realm that, particularly in Italy, offered a vehicle for a great many of the country’s most radical composers to stretch their talents into wild and unknown territories, allowing them to infiltrate the public consciousness via the mediums of television and film. Gathering 103 works - 5 CDs ascribed to works by Morricone and 5 to those of Nicolai - little information exists of the musicians involved with recording Dimensioni Sonore, but there has long been speculation that the legendary Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza lingers just out of sight; unsurprising given how wild and masterful it is.
