Eight records to rediscover from Italian cosmic disco

Cosmic opened in April 1979 on Lake Garda, in a room that had been the Mini Piper, built for around seven hundred people with six hundred of them on the floor and nowhere at all to sit down, which left the dancefloor and the bar and nothing else.

Behind the decks stood Daniele Baldelli. What he did in there had no genre name until other people supplied one. He played records from categories that didn’t belong together and brought them all to the same speed.

These are eight of those records, named by him, and no musical category holds them together, nor does a country: the one thing they share is that booth.

Listen while you read

The eight

Johnny Wakelin, “In Zaire” (Pye, 7N 45595, 1976). An English seven-inch that Baldelli was already spinning at Tabu before Cosmic existed, that he carried into the new club, and that he says he still plays today.

Babatunde Olatunji, “Jin-Go-Lo-Ba” (Columbia, CL 1412, 1960). Nigerian percussion, put out by an American major in 1960, nineteen years before the club opened, and running three minutes twenty-five.

Miroslav Vitous, “New York City” (Warner Bros., BS 2925, 1976). Nine and a half minutes of electric jazz. It comes off the album Magical Shepherd. By no measure is it a dance record.

Cat Stevens, Izitso (Island, ILPS 9451, 1977). The album where an English singer-songwriter brings in synthesisers and sequencers, which Baldelli calls hypnotic and tribal, and one of the records he liked to slow down.

Constellation Orchestra, “Cosmic Melody” (Prelude, PRL 12156, 1978). Seven minutes of studio disco. The label was based in New York. The title is a coincidence, and a good one.

Richard Wahnfried, “Time Actor” (Innovative Communication, IC 58 065, 1979). The name hides Klaus Schulze, who plays the synthesisers, engineers, mixes and produces the record, with Arthur Brown on vocals and Vincent Crane on keyboards.

Gaznevada, “Japanese Girls” (Italian Records, EXIT 905, 1980). From Bologna, and one of only two Italian records on this list.

Koto, “Chinese Revenge” (Memory Records, SCV 2202, 1983). Made in Italy. Here’s the good part. The Italian pressing is a twelve-inch cut at 33, while the German one on ZYX is a maxi at 45.

The wrong speed

What Cosmic left behind isn’t a record. It’s a practice: take a track and play it at the speed nobody cut it for.

I’d play Cat Stevens’ hypnotic and tribal Izitso album, and then Lee Ritenour and Depeche Mode at 33 1/3 RPM instead of 45, or a reggae track by Yellowman at 45 RPM instead of 33.

Baldelli doesn’t present it as a theory, he describes a mistake that turned into a method somewhere along the way, because a record would go on at the wrong speed and turn out to sound better like that.

That’s the whole joke inside “Chinese Revenge”. One track, pressed in two countries, comes out at two different speeds because two sales departments decided so, while at Cosmic the decision belonged to whoever was on the decks.

There’s one story about those tapes that tells you how far the thing had travelled. A boy used to come down from Turin. He never once went in to dance, he turned up in the afternoons to buy them.

One day he came back in a Citroën Pallas. He’d paid for it, he said, by reselling those tapes in Turin.