Top marks if you clock the David Lynch reference in the title here.Someone needs to wake up the greatest living visual artist there is from his hokey Maharishi stupor and hand him a Panavision camera.Abel Ferrara, who is back on point, tried without effect, apparently.Yet on our quest to find the missing beats, the curse and challenge set by our beloved Funky Frenchman, we need to rewind further than expected and discover a lost direction.180 bpm can be magic, but less than a fourth of that can transport you somewhere. And maybe, even further.Had History turned even slightly different, or maybe even smarter, dance/club music would still include or embrace an aesthetic that included, or was at least tolerant of, a more downer vibe.Ludes. Weed. Barbiturates. Opiates. Dodgy Prosecco and lager. Dark times to dance away slow and smart. Not just the up up UP of coke, whizz, MDMA et al. UP has a big place, Bop Pills and all that, but the soul needs more than one gear. Italy has more than six.Italy in the late 1970s was not much fun if you you were honest, unarmed, or unarmoured. It still isn't for the straight shooters.If you want to feel this right, check Il Divo.No, not the loud FART of operatic chancers making middle aged female masterbators in Swindon moist, but the film by Paolo Sorrentino which shames all Western political cinema with its daming suggestions and silence. No need to shout the childish notimyname. This says it all in quiet.Anni di Piombo, Years Of Lead. When unanswered political arguments in the fourth cradle of human civilisation were considered via terrorism.The Church infested State had some sick sense of fairness, so tolerated and funded radical killers of 'Left' and 'Right' equally, to give them an outlet and a reason for sensible people on all sides to support the Christian Democrats. Until they became so septic even the vampiric Vatican had to kick them aside in shame.Daniele Baldelli is one of the most magic, and least acclaimed, DJs of all time. As is Beppe Loda. These cats took the tempo low, but the soul high, in more ways than one.Italy was more Third World than Tunisia today. But sure knew how to party. Partying is the most rational reaction to terrible cancers you can't control, see, or even understand.Pleasure and camaraderie is often the only solace and weapon.First was Bia de Angeli. The story is here but in essence this made Studio 54 look like a fucking Belushi's.The clubs, inevitably pimped too hard and closed for having drugs the man does not control, included: Bia de Angeli, then Cosmic, then Typhoon. All gave all this alternative, slow, baroque approach a rich home.Let us refer to/rip off Wikipedia to give science:"In music, the terms Afro, cosmic disco,[1][2] the cosmic sound,[3] free style,[4]and combinations thereof (cosmic Afro,[5] Afro/cosmic[6] Afro-Freestyle,[7]etc., as well as Afro-Funky[8]) are used somewhat interchangeably to describe various forms of synthesizer-heavy and/or African-influenced dance music and methods of DJing that were originally developed and promoted by a small number of DJs in certain discoth�ques of Northern Italy from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. The terms slow-motion disco[9] and Elettronica Meccanica[10] are also associated with the genre.Italian DJs Beppe Loda and Daniele Baldelli both independently claim to have invented the genre and mixing style."Forget the props, what did this mean?A club equivalent of proper Free Jazz. In a way, in an UP space, you can't dance to this.When Charlie Hayden first met Ornette Coleman this Son of the Session South was stunned to be told: "Listen to me, and then go and play what you feel". Charlie had been waiting his whole life for this, to riff free and naked as he pleased. The result was magic. Club/Dance/Etc is rarely as Deep:"The Afro/Cosmic mixing style is freeform in that it allows for short hip-hop style transforms as well as long, beat-matched segues; it sometimes incorporates added percussion and effects; and it permits major speed variations to force songs into a 90�110 BPM range.[11][12] Baldelli would also play 45 RPM records at 33 and vice versa.[13] The Cosmic Sound included a very diverse range of musical styles, from electro and funk to jazz fusion and Brazilian music.[14] Peter Shapiro described Baldelli's music as a "combination of spaced-out rock and tribal percussion."[15] "the Cosmic Sound,"[16] One genre that was usually not part of this mix was Italo disco,[14] which Baldelli believes was generally too mainstream and commercial.[15] In a 2005 feature on Daniele Baldelli, one of the style's founding DJs, music journalist Daniel Wang describes Baldelli's style as "psychedelic, churning, hypnotic."What this was, where it went, and why it is not where we are is the next mystery to solve.