Rewind, album: 'From Here to Eternity' by Giorgio Moroder

Giorgio Moroder

Casablanca

Disco is usually thought of as a mainly American phenomenon, but Italy played an equally important role in its development.

Where American musicians took the grind of funk and overlaid it with an organic palette of soaring Latin-influenced strings, horns and vocals, the Italians took it a step further by adding the throbbing, oscillating, synthesiser-generated electro-chug that shaped not just every four-to-the-floor electronic music genre from house to trance to techno, but also created the template for a lot of contemporary pop music.

Year zero for synthesised electro-disco was 1977. The first disco hit entirely produced with electronic instrumentation was the extraordinary floor-shaking slice of outer-space sex-funk that is Donna Summer's I Feel Love. The man who produced it, Italian Giorgio Moroder, followed it later that year with the album From Here To Eternity, on which he expanded his vision of a futuristic disco music that combined grinding intensity with a spongy, spacey lightness.