We’ve covered genres that were once, and are still to many, challenging fare: Trance, Smooth Jazz, New Age, and more, but one has been a must since the beginning. Visit Italo Disco part 1 here for an essay by Angelica Frey of Italian Disco Stories & faves tips from Hercules & Love Affair, Daniel Wang, and many more.
In reviewing Italo Disco and its ever-resurgent properties, I am revisiting how Italo came to me. When asking other heads, it often started with the same shiny disc, or a burned copy or link to said disc, most likely. It's hard to describe how a DJ’s mix CD could be so impactful in 2026. We have great curators like Michael McKinney (via POW MAG), Michaelangelo Matos, Untitled 909 and others rounding up the month’s or even weeks' best mixes, as well as other practicing DJs like Call Super and CCL, who have been vocal proponents, but it’s rare to find mixes that break through the noise for long. In the piracy era, a mix could be wielded as a statement of intent by, say, DJ /rupture (Herb 19) or Michael Mayer (Herb 67), and could really move the culture.
A CD that made it through circles of all types was 2000’s Mixed Up In The Hague Vol. 1, which arrived from Holland with a Space Echo’d bang. “One of the most celebrated mixes of the decade…The Italo Renaissance started here,” said Resident Advisor. A mix so iconic I get sorta sick thinking about it. The DJ was I-F (short for Interr-Ference), aka Ferenc E. van der Sluijs, a Dutch producer with an imposing presence like his hero, Underground Resistance’s Mad Mike. The source of my disc was, as often, Tadd Mullinx (Herb 105), and my taste for the sound was emboldened by myriad folks around me like BMG of Ectomorph/Interdimensional Transmissions fame, just up the road in Ann Arbor, Carlos Souffront, Detroit DJ Jan D, and Will Calcutt (Herb 69).
Metro Detroit has always been Electro-centric, our founding texts, if reviewed honestly, hew closer to Electro and proto-House (Cybotron’s “Alleys of your Mind” and “Clear” for example), and in a symbiotic back and forth, the third leg of the stool, is Italo/Synth Pop/~Kraftwerk as an informing sound. The missing link cut for proto-Techno, alongside the rare Richard Davis (Cybotron) 7” “Methane Sea” (1978), is of course A Number of Names’ “Sharevari” (1981), which affects the gait of Kano’s Italo Disco pre-amble, “Holly Dolly” (1980). There’s a lot there to go into in a future post. “Sharevari” gets a slate of remixes or covers, we released one by ADULT. and a more recent one by Nation of Language/Nancy Whang also rips (h/t Chris DeVille).
As Carl Craig (Herb 08) has explained:
What was the Chicago/Detroit dynamic like?
Chicago was really important to us, or at least my early days, because Chicago had music that we considered progressive. They call it house music, but it was a twist on a mix of disco and Italo. We loved that kind of stuff, and as it was coming in it wasn’t pouring into Detroit but it definitely perked our ears. Chicago had dedicated clubs that had gone from disco music and turned into house music, so what Frankie Knuckles was doing with The Warehouse and Ron Hardy at The Music Box, those were mythical places to us. We didn’t get something like that until 1988, I think, when The Music Institute started. So the myth of going to the club in Chicago was just huge - I say “myth, but it wasn’t a myth. We were hearing it talked about in this mythical way, and hearing those mixshow tapes that I was talking about earlier. WBMX was playing all that music that was really hard for us to get. If it wasn’t done in Chicago, a lot of it was done on import and stores weren’t ordering the records because they didn’t know about them. Or if they did order it, a record like “Capricorn or Alexander Robotnick “Problèmes D’amour, then they were selling them at the equivalent of $50, you know? 1986, ‘85, before Alexander Robotnick had a domestic release, that was $20 for a twelve-inch. That was crazy, twelve-inches were $3.99.
I-F was already a known quantity, as he had kick-started the electro boom with “Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass” in 1998, a miracle of overblown vocoder (like, you can hear slurping), and some of the most beautiful 808 programming ever witnessed. This song, and Mixed-Up served as a global prod, alongside emergent labels like DJ Hell’s International DeeJay Gigolo Records label, also kick-started what we now call “electroclash,” a term that was widely derided at the time but has since sidled into the new canon alongside Indie Sleaze and other new genre adjacencies.
I’ll write more about Electroclash (and Nu Disco, Disco Nouveau, etc) one day soon, and the controversy of the idea of it as a genre/name, but I wanted to mention that this moment was also fueled hand-in-hand with Italo’s resurgence. I asked Larry Tee, who came up with the name Electroclash, for his thoughts on how the two intertwine:
“Italo was certainly an influence in early electroclash with its very precise, arpeggiated baselines and playful spirit. The often unnoticed politics of electroclash (the most women ever to get into electronic music, Peaches’ new sexual identity, everyone being bi, and anti-mainstream celebrity culture bias kept it from being a rehash of Italo. It was dirtier, and Italo was always very neat.”
- Larry Tee for Herb Sundays
Mixed Up’s legacy was not only unearthing or resurfacing lost Italo gems, but also in giving DJs a framework to DJ in, one that worked in that Kraftwerk, East Coast American Electro (Man Parrish, Jonzun Crew), and contemporary Dutch West Coast Electro was its own Erector set, a Jiffy Cake of ingredients that DJs could play to flesh out a night. His long-running Cybernetic Broadcasting System (CBS) online radio station is the living heart of the movement.
The next cluster bomb came almost a decade later, when Italo actually started to show up in the music. Underground and Indie hits made in the image of Italo Disco from artists like Sally Shapiro, various projects on the DFA and Italians Do It Better label, and “chillwave” artists such as Neon Indian (“Psychic Chasms” weilds a Pineapples sample) and Washed Out (“Feel It All Around” is built on Gary Low’s “I Want You”). This ruminating on the uncool '80s is probably also the basis of a lot of Vaporwave, a topic I will have to ask Stephan Kunze more about one day. A lot of Ghostly’s first ten releases start from Italo, which I’ll also include more about at a later date.
Washed Out’s Ernest Greene said as much in 2011:
“At the time I was spending a lot of time on the internet looking for samples. On E-bay it is really easy to find rare MP3s because there is this sub-culture of vinyl collectors who upload a lot of limited edition and rare stuff. I was downloading tons of stuff and I had never heard that track before. It was actually a hit in Europe and Italy in the early 1980s, but I was just thinking of it as a really good, kind of cheesy disco song. I pitched it down—which you can’t really do with every song, but this song was recorded in such a way that the bass wasn’t too low pitched and it was really trebly, so slowed down it had this really cool quality about it.”
Two of the DJs and Friends who personally got me more deeply into Italo are Jeffrey Sfire and Eli Epstein (aka Photocall, etc.). Sfire I met randomly at a Chicago loft party in the mid 00’s while he was DJing. I, of course, came up during his set (like a Herb), got his number, and became fast friends. He is, to me, perhaps the most influential Italo DJ from the US, and his name crops up everywhere Italo is discussed.
Sensitive - “Don’t Stop” (1985)
2. Paul Paul - “Burn On The Flames” (1985)
Bazooka - “Alive” (1984)
“I got into Italo Disco in the year 2000 when my dear friend Duane Harriott at Other Music handed me a CD and said “You have to buy this.” The CD was ‘Mixed Up In The Hague’ by I-F and it blew my doors off. From that point on, I was completely obsessed. In 2004, I made a record with my friend Terryn Westbrook, completely inspired by Italo, called ‘Silver Clouds’ by Photocall. Things came full circle when I-F reached out to license it for Viewlexx (it ended up on Clone, another favorite label). The great Italo tracks transport you to the cosmic, robotic, sexy space party of your dreams.”
Fave #1: Mr. Flagio - Take A Chance (1983)
Fave #2: The Voyagers - “Distant Planet” (1984)
Fave #3: B.W.H. - “Stop” (1983)
What got her into Italo: Diana Est's 1982 studio performance of "Tenax"
Jo Jo - “Mind Games” (1982)
Video Club - “Lost Time” (1983)
Sylvi Foster - “If You Are Master” (1980)
“For me, italo disco is the music of my childhood, the 80s, it reminds me of going to the south of France with my family for holidays with this music in the car”
My Mine - “Hypnotic Tango”
Klein & MBO - “Dirty Talk”
B.W.H. - “Stop”
Turn-on moment: “Turn of the millennium. It's not strictly pedantically 'italo' but hearing Danny Wang (Ed Note: see last week for Wang’s picks) play the import remix of Passion by the Flirts (imported from Canada, actually?) at Open Air while nearly falling asleep on a couch.”
“Still and always” Mr. Flagio - “Take A Chance”
Squires - “Hold Me”
My Mine - “Zorro”
Turn-on Moment: This sus Winamp Web radio station called Club 977 The 80’s Channel in... 2004-2015.
OK I am in a rush and read “First Italo Track Ever” but in a way this is also my favourite because it was a hard introduction for me, way before I ever heard Spacer Woman and this must have been in 2015:
O’Gar - “Playback Fantasy”
Loui$ - Pink Footpath (Disco Mix)
1: Expansives - “Life With You”
2: G.A.N.G. - “Incantations”
Jo Squillo Eletrix - “Avventurieri”
Intro: “I actually heard Fake’s “Another Brick” on an 80s alternative megamix in the 2000s and fell completely in love with that sound—but had no idea it was Italo. That song imprinted itself onto me, and when I had found Savage’s music videos while obsessively mining through Youtube a couple years later, I knew I had to uncover more. Finding rare (and original) Italo Disco records in the wild is such an incredible moment. As a digger, finding one feels like a huge win.”
1. “I am a sucker for those melancholy tracks. “Polynesia” does it for me every single time.”
It’s hard but I gotta say “Broken Tale”—do you see a pattern here? Ultimate sadness all the way.
The music video paired with the song is truly special
“My classmate recorded a mixtape with "italio disco" when I was 10 years old. I was blown away by the crystal clear electronic sounds! From then on, I started to spend most of my money on italo disco records. Moments when I had a new Italo disco compilation in my hand were very special in my childhood. In my music career, moments when I have been able to work with some original Italo disco artists have also been very special to me.”
Savage - “Don't Cry Tonight”
Italian Boys - “Midnight Girl”
Domina - “You Got My Soul”
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