A compilation of some favorite Italian DJ’s and producers including Tiger & Woods, Lele Sachi, DJ Rocca and more

1.Boot & Tax - Macinare
2.Capofortuna - MA NU
3.Tiger & Woods - Machete
4.Dj Rocca - Do U Luv Me
5.Memoryman - My Brother
6.Funk Rimini - Don’t Smoke
7.LowHeads - Tsubasa
8.Deep88 - Sp1200
9.Lele Sachi - Proud
10.Jolly Mare - Dribbling

Italo and Funk! A long standing relationship that goes back to American R&B artists connecting with the Italian audience in the 60's. At that time the Italian music market was still influential on a global scale and you could find an artist like Wilson Pickett singing in Italian (with a quite puzzling accent!) at the Sanremo Festival in 1968. The song he performed, "Un'Avventura", was written by Ludo Battisti the biggest Italian pop star of all time, a lover of all black American music, who has recently been re-discovered by global diggers, for his psychedelic, latin, funky period of the mid to late 70's. But the market was ready for that real funk: in 1971 James Brown performed "Sex Machine" live on national TV. Then Umbria Jazz festival opened for business in 1973 bringing the likes of Weather Report and Horace Silverto the more intellectual side of listeners. While the mainstream crowd was grooving in cinema theaters to the orchestral funk of masters like Piero Umiliani, Piero Piccioni and Armando Trovajoli and their soundtracks of the 'Poliziotteschi' B-Movies.

With the 70's giving us the Mediterranean soul-funk of Napoli Centrale, directly influenced by the nearby NATO American base dwellers, the picture was complete: it was time for the Disco revolution! From Moroder to Mauro Boncaldi the list of Italian pioneers that molded dance music into a new hybrid of electronic basslines and over the top melodies is endless. The enormous international success of Italo Disco created a market of independent labels and distributions that were the basis of the next mutation of funky dance music: House. Italo Disco influenced the birth of House in America and then House came back to Italy and gave a new generation of producers the kick in the ass to start their own thing.

And here we are today with this bunch of friends, mostly born out of the underground scene of the 90's. DJs and producers who don't fit into any conventional music scene and learned their music, by listening to avant-garde shades of Italo house, or by traveling abroad, trying to embrace the more daring sides of electronic boogies.

When I first met Christian from BOOT & TAX (the other half is studio wizard Claudio Brioski) in the mid-90's he was a devoted fan of the funkiest U.S. House music, before going on to discover the craziest and most psychedelic sides of machine produced music. ROCCA is also part of this mid-90's group of visionaries; we would travel the Al every week, I would go down to the legendary Maffia club in Reggio Emilia, where he was head and resident DJ and he would come up to Tunnel in Milan, where I was pushing all sorts of modern and alternative dance music. Age-wise LOWHEADS could be Rocca's kids and also coming from Reggio Emilia....well, you never know! They are at the forefront of the new Italian deep house scene. Only a few miles away, we enter the city of Bologna, Italy's long-time capital of students and creativity (our San Francisco?). If you stop a random dance music fan on the street and ask him to solve the equation Bologna + House Music the answer will be: Pastaboys. The rulers of soul, funk and latin intoxicated house in the 90's are here represented by MEMORYMAN (aka UOVO) and Rame in the 'live musicians meets DJ culture' project CAPOFORTUNA. The 'live' side of Capofortuna are FUNK RIMINI, named for their love of the genre and their home town, they also deliver a track for the comp. From the end of the 70's up until the early 00's the Adriatic summer clubbing season was invaluably influential in bringing the electronic underground dance sounds to the masses, so it's not a surpri