Credit: Dangerous Minds / Sonor Music Editions

When I was in Tokyo in the mid-1990s, there was a dance-floor craze for the soundtrack of Sesso Matto (“sex-crazy”), a silly, sleazy 1970s Italian sex comedy romp starring Giancarlo Giannini and sexy screen siren Laura Antonelli in multiple roles.

Later, it was released as How Funny Can Sex Be? in the rest of the world. I’m pretty sure that this was the direct inspiration for Cibo Matto’s name. Almost any hip Japanese person of a certain age would definitely know it.

I brought a copy home with me, and it has occupied an honoured position in my record collection ever since, and is a front-line choice for inclusion on most of my (coveted!) mixed CDs, and to this day, it’s my secret weapon when I’m DJ’ing. But don’t tell anybody.

Released in 1973, Sesso Matto is a raunchy omnibus of Italian sex farce at its most absurd. Directed by Dino Risi, the film strings together a set of loosely connected sketches about obsession, repression, and full-frontal disaster. Antonelli shape-shifts through multiple vignettes like a goddess of dysfunction, while Giancarlo Giannini plays the perennial Italian male—sweaty, baffled, and hopelessly underqualified for the situations he finds himself in. Think of it as an oversexed Twilight Zone made by a satyr with a Super 8 camera. There’s no grand message here, just a series of increasingly ridiculous sexual mishaps, shot with the kind of overlit gloss that screams “EUROTRASH!” in 72-point type.

But let’s be honest, the 1973 comedy is nothing great, but the awesome soundtrack… my god, that soundtrack is freaking sublime. An absolute revelation.

Composer Armando Trovajoli’s memorable score featured horn sections, an especially funky drummer and bass player, Mini-Moogs, the sounds of a female in loud orgasmic bliss and bongo drums. What could be more perfect than that? It’s a weird and groovy pastiche of sounds that shouldn’t work together, but DO. The Sesso Matto soundtrack album even has a Rossini number played on the Arp synthesiser, a kissing cousin of Switched-On Bach by way of Looney Tunes.

Trovajoli’s score is a fever dream stitched together from bits of sleaze lounge, strutting funk, and early Moog experimentation. There’s something intentionally over-the-top about it, a cartoonish quality that leans into the absurd. One track might feel like a candle-lit encounter on a shag rug; the next like a chase scene ripped from a low-budget spy flick with a wah-wah pedal.

In 1976, West End Records put out a 12” disco mix of the title theme, which was well known to New York DJs and heard in places like The Loft and Studio 54. ‘Sesso Matto’—which was clearly influenced by Manu Dibango’s ‘Soul Makossa’—is part of hip-hop’s DNA, heard in many of the earliest rap hits thanks to Grandmaster Flash’s frequent use of its several clean break beats.

Beat Records reissued the full score a few years ago, and it’s a minor miracle for lovers of the strange and the sleazy. The new edition pulls the curtain back on the whole circus: longer takes, previously unused cues, and alternate versions that feel almost like Trovajoli remixing himself in real time. Some of it leans more experimental—lots of echo-drenched passages and echo chamber oddities—but that’s the beauty of it. The sleaze becomes cosmic. It feels like you’re hearing a lost library record meant for a space-age bachelor pad orbiting a red light district.

Every collection needs at least one record that raises eyebrows before the needle even drops. Sesso Matto is mine. It’s the one I pull out when the mood in the room needs a good sideways jolt—groovy, ridiculous, and just barely keeping a straight face. It’s not just background noise for bedroom comedies; it’s a technicolour hallucination disguised as a funk record. And if you can’t find it on vinyl, at least track it down digitally and blast it while you do something delightfully wrong. Thank me later.