In the late seventies, Turin’s pulse quickened through the efforts of Ivo Lunardi, a DJ and club owner who understood that a dance floor could hold more than local hits. His Voom Voom Music imprint drew from Disco polish, Pop structures, Rock energy, and the deep Funk lines arriving from Black America, assembling a catalogue that looked well beyond Italy’s borders. The label gave space to Afro-Rock outfits like M’Bamina and the shape-shifting productions of Luigi Venegoni, whose Stratosferic Band moved between Progressive Rock and the emerging language of Italo with ease. These records carried the weight of intent, not just inventory. Since 2016, Gianluca Pandullo aka I-Robots has overseen the master tapes through Opilec Music and Turin Dancefloor Express, preserving a legacy that reaches from Piedmont to Kinshasa to New York. The music endures because it was never provincial – it always understood itself as part of a larger conversation.

Now, from those vaults emerges “I-Robots presents Echoes Of Italy: The Age Of Voom Voom Music – Turin Dancefloor Express,” a twelve-track collection curated by Gianluca and released digitally through the closely linked Space Echo and Dialogo Records. The selection spans the label’s most fertile period, gathering productions that defined an era when Italian dance music first looked outward.

The Boston Garden’s “Lady Pick-Up” surfaces here as an unreleased edit from 1975, pulled from the vaults and set loose by Maestro Pandullo. The track places KC & The Sunshine Band’s strut in a room with Manu Dibango’s indelible groove – two conversations happening at once, each informing the other. The rhythm section locks in with the kind of frictionless confidence that defined the era’s best session work, while horns punch through at exactly the right moments. What distinguishes this edit is its restraint: nothing overstays, nothing clamours for attention. It simply moves, the way a floor moves when the temperature is right. A lost take from a fertile moment, now found and set loose again.

You can find (and buy) this and other music pearls on the Bandcamp page of the labels.

Follow I-Robots, peeps!