Italian Mixtapes

DJ mixes and mixtapes from one of Europe's most passionately musical countries - digitized and restored from original cassette tape and CD recordings.

In the early 1990s, Italy hosted one of the most prolific scenes in the burgeoning world of house music. While the majority of Europe was only just beginning to digest the arrival of this new musical genre born in the US, Italian clubs, DJs, and labels were hot on the heels of their counterparts in the already established scenes of New York and London. The epicenter was the Adriatic coast, where the clubs of Riccione and Rimini - informed by the region's anti-fascist history and nurturing of alternative cultures - became renowned for hosting house and techno's biggest names, with around 30 major clubs running in the area at the scene's peak. Chief among them was Cocoricò, a pyramid-shaped club on the hills above Riccione that opened in 1989 and quickly developed an international vision - bringing in DJs and artists from across Europe and America at a time when most Italian clubs were still booking local acts. Resident DJs like Leo Mas, Ricky Montanari, Flavio Vecchi, and Marco Trani were central to the scene, while underground crews like the DEA (Dance Enforcement Agency) and Acid Drops in Turin, and Hard Raptus in Rome were among the first to push more underground sounds - trance, Goa, drum & bass, and breakcore - through the first wave of Italian illegal raves.

These tapes document a scene that burned as bright as any in Europe during the 1990s and has never gotten nearly the international recognition it deserves. Restored from analog sources and archived here for the record.