Giorgio Moroder, born Giovanni Giorgio Moroder, emerged in the mid-1970s to become a pioneering force in electronic disco, not only with “I Feel Love” and his many other chart-topping hits with Donna Summer but with his own albums From Here to Eternity and E=MC² as well as his 1978 collaboration with Chris Bennett, Love’s in You, Love’s in Me. After establishing himself, Moroder found a home for himself in movie soundtracks, composing music for Cat People, American Gigolo, and Scarface among many others.
Moroder grew up in South Tyrol, Italy where he was raised in a dual-language household (German & Italian)—his mother even called him “Hansjörg” growing up. He spent the late 1960s in Berlin, where he released a minor hit called “Looky Looky” in 1969.
Animator Nicolo Bianchino, who lives in Brooklyn, recently released a playful video homage to Moroder’s early years, based on the third track off of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories in which Moroder explains how hard it was to break into the music scene ... even living out of his car for some stretches: “I would take my car, would go to a discotheque, sing maybe 30 minutes—I think I had about seven, eight songs—I would partially sleep in the car because I didn’t want to drive home, and that helped me for about, almost two years to survive in the beginning.”
Moroder explains that he wanted to incorporate the “sound of the future” in his music. Eventually he realized, “Wait a second… I know the synthesizer—why don’t I use the synthesizer, which is the sound of the future? ... I knew I needed a click so we put a click on the 24 track which then was synched to the Moog Modular. I knew that it could be a sound of the future but I didn’t realize how much the impact would be.”
Bianchino’s playful and gentle video does a wonderful job of complementing Moroder’s words. Take a look:
via Eye on Design
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Watch P-Orridge, Moog, Moroder, Can and many more in the electronic music documentary ‘Modulations’