Italian composer Ennio Morricone’s maxim, “Music must be able to say what words cannot”, was the subject of research at the inaugural SLAM – Sounds Like a Movie festival, organized by Cam Sugar, held in Milan this month.
The new international festival, a collaboration between CAM Sugar and Triennale Milano, packed more than 30 events in the Design Museum’s galleries and performance spaces from November 14th to 16th, bringing together around 100 artists for screenings, talks, listening sessions, live gigs and DJ sets. Organizers have already promised to hold a second edition in 2026.
For CAM Sugar, which celebrates its 65th anniversary this year, SLAM served as a vehicle for boasting a vast library of over 2,500 Italian and French film scores, from “La Dolce Vita” and “8 1/2” to “Il Postino.” “The main exploration of my work is to let archives take on a life of their own,” says Andrea Fabrizi, CAM Sugar’s global head of archives and restoration, who curated some of the weekend’s most popular listening sessions. His program is based on a trilogy of listening sessions, DJ sets and talks, and he says this format allows the audience to “see that particular historical moment completely through the music” while also hearing how the music still vibrates today.
The Come Sugar archive continues to power new work by filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Wes Anderson, and has been sampled by artists ranging from Drake to Tyler, the Creator.
black o
black o
Fabrizi describes the archive as a kind of “reading room before there were rooms,” where certain cues are built to fire directly into the body, such as “the charge of movement, the rhythm, the way the arrangement breaks down,” while others are psychological, and are designed to be listened to closely in a “quiet space.” This division, he says, determines whether a piece belongs on the dance floor, in a focused listening session, or ideally both. Sometimes the magic is in the contrast. It’s about “dropping something fragile in the middle of a ditch and watching people believe it.”
He cited the music of Piero Piccioni’s “Il Caso Mattei,” which was shown over the weekend, as the kind of deep cut that the archive was built to bring to the surface. This music, he argues, is a blend of jazz intuition, political tension, and a near-spiritual minimalism that today’s producers would call experimental, quietly rewriting the rules of film music in the early ’70s.
The first edition of SLAM leaned heavily into Morricone’s legacy, including an exclusive preview of an unreleased recording of “Il Clan dei Siciliani” in a dedicated listening session, ahead of its December release on triple vinyl and double CD. The program also featured a tribute concert from longtime collaborator Enrico Pieranunzi and a talk contextualizing the maestro’s influence on contemporary film and sampling culture.
black o
On the French side of the archive, A&R and Restoration Lead Stéphane Lerouge highlighted the diversity of CAM Sugar’s holdings, from avant-garde experimentation and pop to South American grooves. His passion project this year is the revival of the cult thriller score “La Scoumoune” by François de Roubaix. The team at Le Rouge located and digitized the original studio masters, allowing them to release for the first time an expanded and definitive version of the music, complete with Droubet’s own notes about the overdubbing process.
For Lerouge, the restoration work emphasized the universality of film music. He recalls Morricone saying that he had no trouble learning foreign languages because “the language of music is universal,” a sentiment that is borne out by the cult following of these scores in Japan and the United States decades after their initial release.
That universality was a recurring theme in key conversations with SLAM’s current supervisors and composers. Mary Ramos, director Quentin Tarantino’s longtime music director, told Variety that her process often begins with what she calls a “yes and a playlist.” It’s a collaborative interaction with directors to coordinate what the film should and, just as importantly, shouldn’t sound like.
Ramos’ long collaboration with Tarantino has yielded some of SLAM’s most fruitful anecdotes, including convincing the director to commission new music for the first time on Django Unchained. She also recalls building the soundtrack around the twin themes of love and revenge, coaching John Legend to send Tarantino a cassette and a handwritten letter, and creating an unusual hybrid of James Brown’s “The Payback” and unreleased Tupac vocals that ultimately led to the film’s bloodiest shootout.
Even as the festival went heavily analog, it didn’t ignore the digital elephant in the room. Lerouge cautioned against directors relying too much on temporary playlists in the editing bay, saying it was a “limitation in terms of imagination” that could force composers into copy-and-paste work. His appeal to filmmakers was simple. Just as Italian producers once trusted Morricone, Nino Rota, and their ilk to invent something new, so they trust composers, especially young composers.
Meanwhile, another panelist, Nicolas Winding Refn, argued for embracing technology while questioning its economics. A self-described “big advocate” of technology, the director sees AI as just another tool in a creative ecosystem where much of mainstream content is already shaped by data. He suggested that the real danger lies not in whether AI can write decent scores, but in the inequalities that arise when technology “reduces the human touch” and hollows out the financial ecosystem that supports working artists.
LeRouge summed up the purpose of the festival as the lights go down: “A composer is an artist who reacts to the work of other artists, and no machine can replace that human brilliance.”
