Sensations’ Fix are filed under Italian progressive rock and they sound nothing like it. Franco Falsini, a Tuscan guitarist, went to England, then to Virginia — Virginia — where he built himself a rough studio and started making music that has far more in common with Cologne and Dusseldorf than with Rome: electronic, echoing, mostly wordless, floating. Finest Finger is the album where he started singing, and it is the friendliest way into one of the strangest catalogues Italy ever produced.

The short version

Their fourth album, released on Polydor in 1976, eight tracks, none of them long. Franco Falsini plays guitars and synthesizers and sings, and wrote all of the music and the words; Richard Ursillo plays bass; Keith Edwards plays drums; Stephen Head joins on keyboards and turns the group into a four-piece. Filippo Milani produced. It is their first record with a lot of singing on it and their most accessible by some distance — there are overdubs, and it sounds like somebody finally paid for studio time. Falsini’s English is the English of a man who lived in America, and his voice is an ordinary man’s voice, which is exactly why the band still sound like amateurs in the best sense.

The man who went to Virginia

Falsini had been on the Italian scene since the mid-sixties. He moved to England, formed a band, brought it back to Italy, watched it fall apart, and then did the least likely thing available: he relocated to Virginia and built a crude studio there. The demos he made in it became the first Sensations’ Fix records. That geography explains everything about this band — why they sound German rather than Italian, why they were never part of the Roman or Milanese scenes, why nobody quite knew where to put them. It also explains the mess. Starting with this album Falsini began recycling his own music, rebuilding old instrumentals into new songs under new titles; the charitable reading is that he was unhappy with how Polydor handled his catalogue and had no say in it, and the less charitable one, offered by more than one reviewer, is that he enjoyed confusing the accountants. Either way the discography is a maze and it always will be.

The sound

Analogue electronics, filtered guitar, Moog textures and a lot of air. If you know Ash Ra Tempel or the quieter end of Tangerine Dream you know the territory, though Falsini is warmer than either and more interested in melody than in drift. What is new here is structure: the pieces are songs, three and four minutes long, with verses and hooks, and the band play them like a band rather than a laboratory. Head’s keyboards fill space the old trio left empty. And Falsini’s voice, which purists complain about, is the thing that makes the record human — no matter how professional the group tried to become, that everyman delivery keeps the whole thing endearing rather than clinical.

Reading up on Italian prog? The books go deeper →

The songs

Strange About Your Hands opens and is the classic here — an earlier instrumental rebuilt with words, insinuating, and the single best argument for the whole song-based turn. Just a Little Bit More on the Curve and Yardbirds Dream follow, both under four minutes and both picked out as highlights by the American press at the time. Map is five minutes. Boat of Madness is short and strange. The Left Side of the Green folds in a piece called Macumba Fog and runs past five. The title track is three and a half. And Into the Memory closes at six minutes, the longest thing here, and it is the one that sends you back to the instrumental albums.

Reception and legacy

An American reviewer in 1976 recommended this album as a good sample of contemporary Italian music and then wrote the sentence that explains this entire website: that Italian bands could barely find work or studios inside Italy, that the industry there lagged behind Germany let alone Britain or America, and that so far only PFM had managed to become an export — and even they were struggling in the States. Sensations’ Fix never got out. Boxes Paradise followed in 1977 in much the same style, then Flying Tapes in 1978, largely reworkings; the band eventually renamed themselves Sheriff and settled in Virginia for good. And then, decades later, the reissue labels found them: RVNG put out an anthology in 2012 and a generation of listeners who had never heard of Italian progressive rock discovered Falsini through electronic music instead.

The verdict

For the curious, and the right place to start with this band if you want songs. If you want the real Sensations’ Fix, go to Fragments of Light and Portable Madness first and come back here afterwards — this is the accessible one, and accessibility was never quite the point. Play Strange About Your Hands and Into the Memory. Then the German records this actually resembles, and Le Orme’s Smogmagica for the other Italian band edging towards electronics in the same years. An Italian in Virginia making krautrock for Polydor. Nobody knew what to do with it. They still barely do.

Browse the bookshelf in the footer →