Earthset releases soundtrack for restored silent film L'Uomo Meccanico

The Italian rock band Earthset has released a vinyl record of their live soundtrack for the 1921 silent film L'Uomo Meccanico, directed by André Deed (known in Italy as Cretinetti) and produced by Milano Films. The film, considered the first Italian science fiction/horror silent movie and one of the earliest to feature an automaton, was long thought lost until the 1990s when the Cineteca di Bologna restored a fragment from the last surviving reel discovered at the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo. The soundtrack project originated from the Workshop Soundtracks 2018 at the Centro Musica di Modena, curated by Corrado Nuccini (Giardini di Mirò) and Stefano Boni (Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino), with mentorship from Nicola Manzan (Bologna Violenta). Earthset performed the live cine-concert at the Institut Français Centre Saint Louis in Rome on January 31, 2020, and the album was released the same day by Dischi Bervisti and Koe Records. The band emphasizes that all sounds are produced live with analog instruments, without synthetic or electronic elements. The score blends post-rock, psychedelia, noise, and early 20th-century avant-garde techniques, including hexatonal and dodecaphonic writing. The film predates Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and anticipates Japanese mecha imagery with its battle between a good and evil mechanical monster.