Sette note in nero

"Sette note in nero" (aka “The psychic”) directed in 1977 by Lucio Fulci (1927-1996) is one of the best movies of the roman director. Yet far away from the realization his most famous and celebrated horror-gore movies ("L'aldila'", "Zombi 2" etc), here Fulci prefers to base the story on the classic Giallo with recalls to Edgar Allan Poe and to supernatural. Thanks to a very good team of scenario writers, "Sette note in nero" tells the disturbing plot about a young woman (Jennifer O’Neil) who owns clairvoyance dowries (in fact as a child she was able to “see” her mother’s suicide kilometres far away). During a car travel she has visions, rich of particulars regarding a murder happened years before in her husband’s villa…but during the story her visions reveal themselves as premonitions. This Fulci movie plays all on the protagonist’s visions, and it results to be a perfect clock mechanism where in the finale everything is leaved the case and everything has a concrete explanation. The movie’s last sequence is a declared tribute to the writer Poe, one of the favourite ones of the director. He is tributing him with in a more faithful way four years later realizing the splendid, but underrated “Black cat”. Lucio Fulci has always given attention to the music in his movies collaborating with noted composers like Ennio Morricone, Angelo F. Lavagnino, Riz Ortolani, Carlo Rustichelli, Francesco De Masi, Pino Donaggio, but he was particularly satisfied with the artistic relationship with Franco Bixio, Fabio Frizzi and Vince Tempera, authors of the music scores for his westerns “I quattro dell’apocalisse” (1975) and “Sella d’argento” (1978) (available on Digitmovies CDDM023) and for “Sette note in nero”, a score that Digitmovies presents for the absolute first time in its complete form. From this OST only a 45 rpm single (MDF 112) was issued in 1977 with the tracks “7 note” and “Tracce sul muro” (tr.21 & tr.22), while the theme “With you” (tr.19) was issued on an album of the singer Linda Lee. A further track “Sette note in nero” (tr.19) was already available on a compilation album of the noted sax player Gil Ventura. To realize this CD, we had to remix completely every tracks using stereo multitracks of the original session cause the mixed master tapes of the complete score did not exist. The orchestral score alternates between suspense themes and more action and rhythmic ones, reflecting perfectly the torbid and mysterious atmosphere of the story. Throughout the score often appearing are also film versions of the single tracks. This score was recorded during the month March 1977 between Rome and Milan, performed by U.M.R. orchestra Unione Musicisti di Roma conducted by Vince Tempera and with performances of great soloists like Gil Ventura sax, Julius Farmer electric bass, Massimo Luca guitar, Gianni Dall’Aglio drums. Among the instruments used in the session, and very popular in those days, we can find Mellotron, Arp Odissey, electronic drum Roland TR 77 and Clavinet D 6 Hohner. Franco Bixio likeably remembers today that at the time of the recording session he travelled to Switzerland obstinately searching for the perfect sounding carillon to create the leit motiv. Quentin Tarantino, who goes mad for this movie and for this genre of Italian Cinema, absolutely wanted to enclose this carillon theme in his “Kill Bill! Vol.1” (2003)