overground scene

It’s been a while since I’ve written something for this series of posts, but the reason is not a lack of intertextual references in music. On the contrary, I constantly come across cool new cases of musicians referencing other musicians. But, it had been a while since I came across a really interesting one, until recently, when I re-watched Lucio Fulci’s Aenigma, and I suddenly realised that part of the film score is almost identical to a melody of a song by Sadist. This is an interesting case for various reasons. First of all, it is another example of the intersection of horror cinema and metal music. Secondly, it sheds light to an interesting part of the Italian rock lineage, tracing Italian death metal back to Italian prog rock.

Carlo Maria Cordio – Aenigma (1987)

Lucio Fulci is a legend of Italian gory horror. Although I prefer Joe D’Amato, Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) and The city of the living dead (1981) are all-time favourites of mine. Aenigma is a really cool film about a girls’ college, where the hospitalisation of a bullied student following a prank sets off a series of mysterious deaths. I think of it as a mix between Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977) and Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976). Classic Italian awesomeness, including all the staples of the genre, including dreamlike suspenseful sequences, gruesome deaths, nudity, etc. Carlo Maria Cordio is a composer who’s written scores for other masters of the genre, like Joe D’Amato’s awesome Absurd (1981). The music he wrote for Fulci’s Aenigma is an appropriately cool Italian horror soundtrack with the expected prog rock vibes, Hammond organ, etc. The five note melody starting at 0:56 (C-G-G#-D#-A#, For guitar it’s basically a capo at the 8th fret) is the one I presume inspired Tommy Talamanca of Sadist.

Sadist – From Bellatrix to Betelgeuse (1995)

Sadist is another one of those death metal bands that blew my mind when I first got exposed to the genre. I first listened to them from a friend’s cassette tape which had Above the light (1993) on one side and Death’s Symbolic (1995) on the other. I remember listening to it on my Walkman on my way to school and my knees would buckle every time one of the guitar solos would kick in (the one near the end on “Sometimes they come back” is still one of the most amazing solos I have ever heard). “From Bellatrix to Betelgeuse” is a fantastic instrumental song off the band’s second album, Tribe, which also happens to be the last Sadist album I like. The first time I heard of Tribe, and the first time I listened to a song off it, was during the first days of the internet in my family home, sometime in early 1997, when I found Sadist’s website where they had uploaded snippets of songs (it was the eponymous “Tribe” I listened to). The melody at the beginning of the song is the one I think may have been inspired by Aenigma. It is the same chord, although Tommy (Sadist’s leader) expanded it by four notes, and overall the melody sounds very similar.