Typhoon scene

TYPHOON

Gambara, Brescia Northern Italy - December 19th, 1980 to September 3rd, 1987.

“People of Typhoon were mainly from Brescia/Verona/Cremona/Mantova (Northern Italy),” explained Italian DJ and pioneer of the early ‘80s ‘Afro’ sound Beppe Loda, to Manchester’s Cosmic Disco website. “Many of them looked like hippies: long haired, laced ankle-boot wearing types who used to travel in French cars (Citroen’s ‘Pallas’ or Renault’s ‘Deux Chevaux’), fully plastered with stickers of their favourite discos… and the music was very slow in rhythm, funky, all kinds of Disco, New-Wave, Industrial, Electronica, Percussive, Fusion, Pop, Rock, Prog… It was a real melting pot.” While much of the recent press attention on the futuristic Italian discos at the turn of the ‘80s, has focused on Baia Degli Angeli and the Cosmic Club where Daniele Baldelli held court, credit should also be given to Typhoon’s pioneering DJ Beppe Loda, and his fanatical followers with one ear to Africa and the East and the other to outer space. “I would mix a minimal track a-la Philip Glass into a Zaka Percussion track, or a Steve Reich track into an African chant, or Vangelis’ ‘Hypothesis’ over a drum track, or even Richard Wahnfried (Klaus Schulze) mixed into the Arpadys,” remembers Loda, who like Baldelli was a wizard at the mixer, slowing down and speeding up records to create a warped and druggy soundtrack for the wide eyed clubbers to lose themselves. In an age where a click of a mouse can bring you into Fela’s yard one second and the studio of Kraftwerk the next, it’s perhaps hard to imagine how exotic and futuristic this organic yet abstract soup of music must have sounded at the time. But to the ears of an Italian teenager in 1981, the mix of African kalimbas and marimbas with Moog and Juno synthesizers and tracks by Jorge Ben and Manu Dibango blended with Yello and Ryuichi Sakamoto must have sounded as alien as they were exciting.

‘Typhoon – Portrait of the Electronic Years – Synthonic’