Daniele Luppi Reconstructs Italian Film Archives on Wilma, With Michael Kiwanuka

Daniele Luppi’s Wilma treats vintage Italian film music as found footage. Built from a trove of thousands of recordings by some of Italy’s top session players of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, the album excavates cues from obscure 1970s features, commercials, documentaries, industrial films, and short subjects — much of it unused or stored for decades. Luppi doesn’t revive the material. He edits and reshapes it, adding vocals, lyrics, synths, and live drums, including a Yamaha DX7 and Lexicon PCM70, to construct what he describes as a “totally new original story.”

The first volume of an experimental trilogy arrives Oct. 9 via Verve/slowplay. Michael Kiwanuka appears on several tracks, including lead single “To Some Degree,” while Orion Sun shares vocal and songwriting duties; Shungudzo contributes lyrics. Luppi calls Kiwanuka’s artistic perspective “incredibly rare,” citing his “profound sense of humanity.” The casting was closer to choosing actors for a film than recruiting featured singers, with contributions matched to the story’s concern with longing and modern romance.

That cinematic frame extends to the cover, a publicity still of actress Edith Scob photographed by Antonio Gálvez on the set of Luis Buñuel’s The Milky Way. Luppi’s previous collaborators include Danger Mouse, Broken Bells, Karen O, Parquet Courts, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, but Wilma shifts his archival impulse toward a more personal fiction.