Whatitdo Archive Group - The Black Stone Affair (2021)

The debut album by the American Whatitdo Archive Group, conceived as a soundtrack to a non-existent Italian film made in the 1970s. The whole story of the “lost film reel”, the found tapes and the director Stefano Paradisi is part of a carefully constructed artistic mystification that lends the album a special charm.
The album is a love letter to the golden age of Italian film scores, with numerous references to the work of Ennio Morricone, Alessandro Alessandroni and the library music tradition of the 1960s and 1970s. The band combines the musical worlds of cinematic funk, soul-jazz, exotica, afrobeat, bossa nova and spaghetti western into a unified, cinematic soundscape.

The album feels like the soundtrack to a film that never actually existed, yet it easily comes to life in the listener’s imagination. The musicians masterfully evoke the aesthetics of old European films while avoiding the sense of simple stylistic imitation or parody.