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Sonor Music and the Art of Resurrecting Italian Library Records

Lorenzo Fabrizi has built one of the world’s leading labels in reissuing Italian library music. Here’s how.

By Angelica Frey

In Angelo Badalamenti’s “Audrey’s Dance” and “Freshly Squeezed” tracks are certainly similar. The Twin Peaks soundtrack was composed and recorded between 1989 and 1990, whereas Brugonlini recorded and released “Impressianico” in 1970. 

The record is one of the marquee releases of Rome-based label Lorenzo Fabrizi, Sonor’s CEO and Founder. “The result is a crazy mix of psychedelia, free jazz, and jazz rock.”

Underground
Sandro Brugnolini
2014
Avant-garde Jazz, Soundtrack, Free Jazz
Vinyl, Compilation
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For those not in the know, library music is music recorded by work-for-hire musicians around a concept or theme, to varying degrees of specificity, distributed to TV and film studios to create a library of background sounds, jingles, and soundtracks to use when needed. Other times, commissions revolved around a specific project. It was a scene rife with experimentation, with avant-garde jazz, psychedelia, and early usages of synths employed by classically-trained and self-taught musicians all coexisting.

Today, crate-diggers fawn over library music. At the time of peak musical productivity in the scene in the 1970s and ’80s, Rome was the film epicenter in Europe, thus making Italy the chief exporter of many of today’s most celebrated releases. Notable names include Piero Piccioni, all of whom have had their work reissued by Sonor.

Fabrizi credits working at the Rome-based record store Hellnation with building his cultural foundation and meeting mentor figures. “When you’re surrounded with all those artifacts, you ively acquire a lot of interests in genres that maybe you were not familiar with, if only by the fact that you kept seeing them around you,” he says.

Working at the store between 2008 and 2013 proved to be the ideal training ground before launching Sonor. While working at Hellnation, he became personally and professionally acquainted with people in the Roman punk scene. Specifically, he met Synthetic Shadows, who taught him the ropes of how to manage a label, archive releases, and where and how to dig for rarities to sell and reissue.  

In the summer of 2012, De Iulis informed Fabrizi about a man East of Rome who claimed he had a collection of up to 20,000 records “There were more like 5,000-7000,” Fabrizi corrects. 

“That’s where I saw library music records for the very first time,” says Fabrizi. “At first, I did not understand what on Earth they were all about: I was used to seeing commercial records — reggae, punk, and even pop-music records — those were neither commercial productions nor movie soundtracks. I was drawn to them because I wanted to learn more about them.”

Interacting with those records made him want to start his own label. He saw a gap in the market. While the soundtrack market was already saturated, at the time, the only notable label that specialized in pressing vintage library music pieces was Cinedelic.

He started by acquiring the licensing rights of two releases from the Cometa catalog. 

“What’s cool about when I started is that acquiring licensing rights to reissue those records was very affordable because there had not been, quite yet, a newfound interest in it,” he explains. “A big American distributor ed me and said that, were I to print 1000 copies, they would immediately order 500 of them.” 

C 364 – Antico E Moderno
Mario Molino
2016
Stage & Screen, Experimental
Vinyl, LP
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Coincidentally, he had just printed 500 copies before speaking to the distributor.

“This was just a bet, a test run: I was only 24, a newbie, so I told myself that, were these inaugural two launches to bomb, I could always change direction.” 

He proved he could stay the course. Around 2015, interest in library music reprints blossomed. One of the leading re-releases that reawakened interest wasFonit Cetra. “We sold all of the 500 copies we printed in four days,” says Fabrizi.

Sonor was also the first label that reissued a vinyl record of the soundtrack of Franco Micalizzi, landing the label national mainstream attention after being featured in the national newspaper, La Repubblica.

That led Fabrizi to expand Sonor Music’s operations. Aside from acquiring licensing rights to reissue old records, in 2017, he started developing a proprietary catalog where Sonor could directly manage a record’s rights, becoming a full-fledged publisher. 

“I understood I had to make this switch because the market was becoming tougher. Not only is there more competition due to reawakened interest, but the production costs are higher, and people in general have been purchasing fewer records [from us],” says Fabrizi. “Without becoming a publisher with its own catalog and production line, Sonor would have probably died out. If you’re just reissuing records via licensing rights, you need high numbers.”  

Currently, their catalog encomes around 2,000 tracks. “It’s about a thorough work of researching and digging, especially materials that you can acquire at a very low cost, and then slowly turn a profit.” 

Restoring these previously unsung heroes is not just a matter of music knowledge, though. Piano Piano, holds an MA in Art History, and places particular emphasis on identifying and repurposing the original visual assets and typography used for the original releases. “Regarding artwork there’s usually nothing or very little information available,” he explains “In most cases, you have to rely on the original vinyl to scan and carefully restore the artwork, but the good part of library music, which I love, is that they often use paintings and pretty straightforward typography that’s often possible to identify with some research.”

For the 2024 reissue of Alessandro Alessandroni’s , which Sonor has reissued twice, Henriksson rebuilt the original typography in Vector from Roger Excoffon’s Mistral typeface from 1953 to look exactly as it was used on the original artwork. He also sourced the original painting, “Chord in Red and Blue,” from 1958 by Ernst Wilhelm Nay, which was used for the original cover.

“For this new version, we got access to a new copy of the painting through Hamburger Kunsthalle/Bridgeman Images and Ernst Wilhelm Nay Stiftung. The result is that we could present this incredible album and its artwork in a completely new light,” Henriksson explains,

Open Air Parade
Alessandro Alessandroni
2024
Stage & Screen, Psychedelic, Beat, Easy Listening, Funk
Vinyl, LP
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It’s not even an untrodden path. “Modern library music is not even that niche anymore,” says Fabrizi. On that note, “Supreme and made a playlist with lots of Italian library music, including music from the Sonor Music Editions catalog,” adds Henriksson. 

Sonor Music did expand to contemporary artists as well. “At first, we were a little hesitant to do so because of the reputation we had built in the library music scene,” he says. “But archival material is not infinite.” The current lineup includes British JJ Whitefield (Off The Grid to be released June 2025). 

“They make experimental albums that focus on the sound of Italian library music, combining a modern interpretation with a vintage identity,” explains Fabrizi. “It’s easy to always look back, but today we’re living in another golden age of recorded music and there’s a fantastic scene of contemporary artists inspired by library music. For us it makes perfect sense to go full circle and connect the past and the present,” concludes Henriksson.

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