Piero Umiliani's Sound Work Shop

The three notes everybody knows are not on the record you would look for them on.

June 1968, a recording studio, a very hot afternoon. Umiliani is finishing the score for Luigi Scattini’s Sweden, Heaven and Hell and a few short sequences still have no music. Over one of them he improvises a three-note refrain and calls it “Viva la sauna svedese”, long live the Swedish sauna.

Nobody in the room, himself included, hears what it is. The piece stays off the soundtrack album and turns up only on a library long player, Psichedelica, pressed in two hundred copies and not meant for sale.

The rest is known even to people who do not know his name: an American publisher renamed it Mah-Nà Mah-Nà, the Muppets took it, the tune became common property.

What interests us is the other half. It is what the man did across the fifteen years when a record in two hundred copies was his ordinary unit of measure.

The workshop, bought on 27 December 1968

The wish was old: his own label, and a room where he could record, try new instruments and cut film audio. The first half arrives in 1964, with the Omicron publishing house and label.

The name comes from the other “o” of the Greek alphabet, in memory of the Omega imprint his mother Eleonora had set up to protect his rights when he was eighteen.

The first three background-music albums come out in a hundred copies each, recorded at RCA in Rome and at Morandini in Milan.

On 27 December 1968 Umiliani and his wife Stefania buy a few rooms in the Trionfale district of Rome. Within months they become the Sound Work Shop, and from 1969 every soundtrack he self-produces is recorded and edited in there.

New labels arrive with the room: Liuto, SoundWorkShop, VideoVoice, Ciak, Telesound.

Eighty-two square metres, and what was inside them

The room measures eighty-two square metres, acoustically treated for multitrack recording. The equipment list is the part that says the most, because it is the inventory of a man who was not improvising.

Ten Neumann U87s in a private room, in Italy, in 1969, are not a collection. They belong to someone recording real orchestras every day who does not want to postpone anything.

From the United States he brings in his first synthesisers: Moog, Mellotron, Synthi. Their sounds go into the library records, which were the least prestigious and the freest production he had access to.

”Inadequate for the market”

When he looks for national distribution for those albums, the majors reply that they are inadequate for the market. The titles turned down are Switched on Naples, Synthi Time, Tra scienza e fantascienza and Mille e una sera.

Listen while you read

He carries on alone. That is exactly why those records still exist: nobody ever put them in a commercial plan, so nobody ever asked him to make them different.

Twelve records in a year, and five names that were not his

He gets as far as releasing twelve records in a single year. To avoid crowding the library market with albums under his own name he invents others: Zalla, Catamo, Tusco, Rovi, Moggi, Ruscigan.

Those records rarely ran past three hundred copies. Inside them, though, are the players you could get in Rome at the time: pianists Antonello Vannucchi and Enrico Pierannunzi, bassist Giovanni Tommaso, drummers Vincenzo Restuccia and Gegè Munari, trumpeters Oscar Valdambrini and Marcello Boschi.

We passed them around for weeks without noticing that three different sleeves, with three different names, led back to the same man and the same room.

Where that music ended up

Not in shops. Library records were sent to production companies and to RAI to be used as background, and that is where news programmes, reportage, documentaries, Enzo Biagi’s “Rotocalco” and the football round-up 90° Minuto took their music from.

The independent operation runs until 1983, when the library market fades and television background music starts coming from somewhere else.

What is left

A catalogue other people kept digging through. The Right Tempo label put it back in circulation, and DJ Krush, the Cinematic Orchestra, the High Llamas and Kid Loco have all mined it. In 1998 “Lady Magnolia”, recorded in 1971 for To-Day’s Sound, turned up in an ice cream commercial for Algida.

In 2021 Four Flies released L’uomo elettronico, sixteen pieces drawn from the family archive and deliberately aimed at the darker side of his electronic work between 1972 and 1983. It was compiled by Pierpaolo De Sanctis, who says he was the first person outside the family to get access to that material.

The record came out on 14 February 2021. Umiliani died on 14 February 2001.

The studio in Trionfale is still there and still in use, under a different name and different management.