Beat Records’ 2000 CD pairing of 1990: I Guerrieri del Bronx and I Nuovi Barbari works like a late-night double feature reduced to seventy minutes of music. Both films were directed by Enzo G. Castellari in 1982, both construct imaginary futures from whatever American genre pictures were available to imitate, and both use music to create scale that their budgets could not always supply. Yet Walter Rizzati and Claudio Simonetti take noticeably different routes through the wreckage. Rizzati gives the Bronx a loose rock-band identity full of bass, guitar, drums, synthesizer and theatrical incident. Simonetti imagines the post-nuclear wasteland as an electronic system: colder, tighter and driven by repeating sequencer patterns. The CD’s thirty-two cues preserve that contrast rather than trying to make the two scores sound like one continuous work.
The release also corrected an imbalance in their histories. Rizzati’s 1990: I Guerrieri del Bronx had received an Italian soundtrack LP in 1982, although that edition contained only twelve selections. The 2000 disc expands it to eighteen, adding alternate and previously unavailable material. Simonetti’s I Nuovi Barbari had not received a proper contemporary album at all, despite containing some of his most immediately recognisable solo synthesizer writing. Beat’s pairing therefore joins one expanded score to one long-delayed premiere. The result is not merely economical programming. These films belong to the same moment in Italian exploitation cinema, when The Warriors, Escape from New York and Mad Max could be dismantled and recombined into new productions almost before their cultural impact had settled.
Rizzati’s section begins with “Bronx 1990,” a theme that gives Castellari’s gang territory more swagger than despair. Its bass-led rock pulse and electronic ornamentation suggest urban danger, but the music is too colourful to create convincing social collapse. That is precisely why it suits the film. This Bronx is not a realistic ruined borough; it is a collection of costumes, motorcycles, roller skates, weapons and tribal identities. Rizzati treats it as a stage. The principal theme supplies forward movement while leaving enough room for guitar and synthesizer gestures to give the gangs distinct silhouettes.
The score’s physical character is crucial. Rizzati does not present the future as an abstract electronic environment. Bass and drums continually return it to bodies moving through streets, riding motorcycles or preparing for combat. “Fire Knights,” “Hammer Boss” and “The Warriors” carry the blunt authority of entrance music. A character or gang appears, and the soundtrack tells us how much space they expect to occupy. The arrangements are simple, but they are not careless. Short riffs are chosen for immediate identification, then altered through tempo, instrumentation and density as alliances and threats change.
“Trash and Annie” introduces the melodic counterweight. Its softer material does not entirely escape the score’s synthetic surfaces, yet it creates a recognisable emotional space for the central pair. The second version included later on the disc makes the theme’s adaptability clearer. Rizzati can remove some of the rock weight, extend the melody or change the balance between rhythm and atmosphere without losing its identity. In a film populated by exaggerated gang types, this theme performs much of the work required to make Trash and Annie seem like individuals rather than moving pieces of production design.
The shorter suspense cues show how efficiently the score supports Castellari’s editing. “Bronx Suspense,” “N.Y. Suspense,” “Ring Mystery,” “Fear and Death” and “Still and Again” use modest electronic means but avoid collapsing into one generic drone. Pulses, held tones and small melodic fragments are deployed with enough variation to preserve tension across the album. The synthesizers possess the slightly unstable texture characteristic of their period; they do not simulate an orchestra or disappear into a polished ambient surface. Their artificiality belongs to the film’s artificial city.
“Radioprogramme” is one of the section’s eccentric pleasures, interrupting the action vocabulary with a parody of broadcast culture and disposable American sound. It reminds the listener that Italian genre scores were often willing to break tonal consistency for a joke, a source-music imitation or a few minutes of stylistic play. “Skaters Group” similarly embraces the absurdity of a roller-skating gang rather than trying to make it plausible through oppressive music. Rizzati understands that the film’s pleasures depend upon conviction, not realism. If the score treats every strange invention as worthy of its own musical identity, the viewer is encouraged to accept the entire improvised world.
The most excessive piece is “Learning to Die,” which stretches beyond the surrounding cues and invokes the massed, fatalistic force associated with Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna.” Choral drama, slow weight and rock amplification turn a low-budget gang movie into something approaching apocalyptic ceremony. It is shamelessly oversized, but its excess is functional. Castellari’s cinema thrives whenever music, photography and editing insist that an obviously limited production is witnessing myth. On the album, the piece becomes Rizzati’s grand central statement, temporarily replacing street-level rhythm with the expectation of sacrifice.
The additional cues after the material found on the old LP improve the score’s shape as a listening experience. “The Warriors,” “A Bar in the Bronx,” “Fear and Death,” “Still and Again” and “Slow Run” expand its range beyond the principal themes. “A Bar in the Bronx” allows the rhythm section more room and preserves the soundtrack’s connection to a lived-in social environment, however imaginary that environment may be. The concluding pieces gradually reduce the momentum, leaving Rizzati’s future suspended between melancholy and another approaching confrontation.
Simonetti’s “Nuke Is Over” then changes the air immediately. Where Rizzati’s Bronx feels assembled by gangs, Simonetti’s wasteland feels produced by technology. A bright, remarkably catchy synthesizer figure moves over precise percussion while electronic effects open a larger, emptier space around it. The title announces the aftermath of nuclear destruction, but the music is energised rather than mournful. Simonetti converts catastrophe into an electronic hook, establishing the contradiction that drives the score: the world has ended, yet the machinery remains exciting.
“The Survivors,” “Riding Killers” and “The Templars” develop this vocabulary through compact variations. Sequenced patterns provide motion while sharper keyboard attacks mark danger or pursuit. Simonetti’s experience in Goblin is audible, but I Nuovi Barbari is leaner than the group’s best-known horror scores. Progressive-rock elaboration is largely replaced by efficient synthesizer construction. Each cue establishes a pattern quickly, changes colour once or twice and exits before its limited material becomes exhausted.
This economy reflects the film’s production, but it also gives Simonetti’s half of the CD unusual coherence. Electronic effects, drum-machine precision and clipped melodic figures make the wasteland feel governed by a common technology. Electric guitar enters as abrasion rather than as the foundation of a band arrangement. Synth clusters signal violence, while the main pulses continue underneath as though brutality were simply another programmed function of the environment. Compared with Rizzati’s comparatively messy urban music, Simonetti’s future is clean-lined, hostile and depopulated.
Character pieces keep that system from becoming monotonous. “Scorpio” gives the hero a compact identity without resorting to a broad heroic anthem. “Alma the Amazon” softens the harmonic language, while “One and the Gang” restores group movement. The score’s romantic passages are brief and slightly fragile; they sound like temporary shelters inside the electronic landscape. Even the church-organ colour that appears in the program feels less like traditional spirituality than an artifact surviving after civilisation.
“The Medium” and “Nadir and Genius” move into stranger territory. Simonetti’s keyboard timbres can sound playful, sinister and faintly cheap within the same phrase, an ambiguity that suits Castellari’s collision of comic-book archetypes and violent spectacle. “Bows and Catapults” is particularly characteristic of the film’s imaginative logic: futuristic warriors use archaic weapons while synthesizers insist upon technological modernity. Rather than resolving the contradiction, the score makes it pleasurable.
“Scorpio’s Gang” and “Running to the Fight” push the rhythmic material toward the climax. Simonetti layers electronic movement without greatly increasing harmonic complexity, understanding that acceleration and timbral pressure are enough. The second version of “Nuke Is Over” returns the central idea in altered form before “Barbarian End” closes the program with a concise summary rather than a grand resolution. The wasteland continues; only this particular reel has stopped.
Placed together, the two scores reveal how broad the category of early-1980s Italian electronic action music actually was. Rizzati works outward from rock rhythm, character themes and source-music variety. Simonetti begins with synthesizer architecture and lets guitar, organ and melody enter as contrasting colours. Rizzati’s half is longer, more episodic and occasionally uneven, but its irregularity gives the Bronx personality. Simonetti’s half is more unified and immediately addictive, although its reliance on a narrow set of patterns can make the shorter cues feel like sketches around the main theme.
The sound retains the wiry, economical quality of the original recordings. Bass and percussion remain prominent, synthesizers have their period-specific edges, and neither score has been cosmetically transformed into modern retro-wave. That distinction matters. Later musicians have imitated this palette with cleaner equipment and greater low-frequency power, but these recordings capture the sounds while they were still tools of inexpensive futurism rather than nostalgic signs of “the eighties.”
1990: I Guerrieri del Bronx / I Nuovi Barbari succeeds because Beat Records recognised that the films’ shared director and production era mattered more than the composers’ differences. The CD allows those differences to become the attraction. Rizzati builds a ruined New York from rock riffs, gang themes and extravagant drama; Simonetti builds a nuclear desert from sequencers, electronic percussion and melodies that lodge in the brain almost instantly. Both scores lend conviction to futures visibly constructed from borrowed movies, limited resources and enormous enthusiasm. The films may be acts of imitation, but their music possesses identities strong enough to outlive the sources they were supposedly copying.
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