Ennio Morricone & Bruno Nicolai - Dimensioni Sonore - Musiche per L’immagine e L’immaginazione [10CD Remastered Limited Edition Box Set] (2020)

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 endeavours 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 their groundbreaking importance of his work.

Regular collaborators over the course of their respective careers, Morricone and Nicolai met as students during the early 1950s at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome, fostering a friendship that would yield, from the mid 1960s on, hundreds of albums that bear both of their names, in one role or another. Each of these is incredible and worthy of note, but none is as astounding, distinct, or ambitious as Dimensioni Sonore- issued as a series of 10 individual LPs, and as a deluxe box set comprising them all- regarded by many as the crown jewel in RCA’s legendary library music series, Catalogo Di Musiche Per Sonorizzazioni.