On air from 21h till 22h
The 3rd invite by Howlin’ is the iconic Italian dj and producer Daniele Baldelli, pioneer of the Cosmic Disco sound.
Daniele Baldelli started mixing in 1969, a time where mixing was done without headphones, mixers and pitch controls. The term “dj” was not even invented, there was just that boy that played records. Soon after Baldelli was providing music at Baia Deli Angeli, a poshy big VIP club whose booth was in a glassy elevator. This way he could move up and down, seeing the dance floor on the first level and the other three dance floors upstairs.
In the late ’70s Baldelli took up a residency at Cosmic, a nightclub by Lake Garda, and rose to stardom with his experimental mixing style. He combined an extremely diverse range of genres, from European electronica to reggae, synth pop to African folk, often played at improper speeds and mixed with effects and drum machines. Even speeding up vocals at the “wrong speed” on which Baldelli often comments: in Italy, many people don’t really understand the english words, so we don’t care if the voice sounds like Mickey Mouse.
His legendary mixtapes were sold during the weekends and spreaded all over Italy which created real Cosmic fans. Legend says that even the hillsides around the club were parked with kids, too poor to go in but desperate the hear the music from the club.
Balldelli was a true scientist and his sets were based on obsessive research. At home he would try out hundred different records to see which one mixed perfectly with a new track. As he continued experimenting, the heroin and acid flooding the dance floor let tempos creep downwards and his selection grew stranger.
How did that sounded? Imo it’s best described in Bill Brewster’s book: Otherworldy. Dislocated. Unreal. It was as if the music had a different history to the one you knew, like they’d been shopping records on a parallel planet. There was little sense of individual tracks, you lost any firm ground as elements shifted and merged, as you entered tunnels of EQ and phasing, overweight basslines, as songs exchanged sides with each other and back. It was put together like film music.
Wildly eclectic, but not sunny like Ibiza, not gothic like Belgium, in Italy the music was channeled straight from the moons of Jupiter. Cosmic!