Daniele Luppi, Michael Kiwanuka Team On New LP

Daniele Luppi turns a trove of forgotten Italian film music into something new on Wilma, an album that treats vintage soundtrack fragments as raw material for a modern cinematic romance. The acclaimed Italian composer’s first volume in an experimental trilogy arrives Oct. 9 via Verve/slowplay.

Lead track “To Some Degree” is one of several featuring U.K. singer/songwriter Michael Kiwanuka. Luppi says he was drawn to the artist’s “profound sense of humanity. It’s there in every lyric he sings and every performance he gives. His artistic perspective and the way he communicates it are incredibly rare.”

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The project grew out of Luppi’s access to a vast library of thousands of recordings made by some of Italy’s top session players of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s — the country’s rough equivalent of the Wrecking Crew. For Wilma, he excavated cues from obscure 1970s feature films, commercials, documentaries, industrial films and short subjects, including music that had been partially used and material that had spent decades in storage.

Rather than simply revive the sounds, Luppi approached the recordings as a filmmaker might approach found footage, editing and reshaping them into an entirely new narrative. He supplemented the vintage tracks with vocals, lyrics, synths and live drums, using a 1984 Yamaha DX7 and Lexicon PCM70 in the process. “The difference, though, is – unlike a documentarian – I created a totally new original story with the found material,” he explains.

That story revolves around the universal longing for love — and the complications of modern romance — told through Luppi’s deliberately warm, analog palette. Kiwanuka and Orion Sun split vocal duties and songwriting contributions, while songwriter Shungudzo contributes lyrics. Luppi says his casting process was closer to choosing actors for a film than recruiting conventional featured artists, with the singers selected for the emotional character and thematic concerns running through their broader bodies of work.

The album’s filmic sensibility extends to its cover: a publicity still of actress Edith Scob photographed by Spanish avant-garde artist Antonio Gálvez on the set of Luis Buñuel’s 1969 satire The Milky Way.

Luppi has previously worked with Danger Mouse and Broken Bells, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Karen O, Parquet Courts and Gnarls Barkley, while also crafting scores for numerous film and TV productions.

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