At Milan’s SLAM Festival, CAM Sugar Celebrated 65 Years of a Music Catalogue That’s Scored Thousands of Films

The inaugural SLAM – Sounds Like a Movie festival, held in Milan, was founded on a principle championed by the late Italian composer Ennio Morricone: that music possesses a unique ability to express the inexpressible. This new international event, a partnership between music publisher CAM Sugar and the Triennale Milano design museum, transformed the museum's spaces from November 14th to 16th. Over three days, nearly 100 artists participated in more than 30 distinct events, including film screenings, panel discussions, listening sessions, concerts, and DJ sets. The festival's positive reception has already prompted organizers to plan a second edition for 2026.

For CAM Sugar, which is currently marking the 65th anniversary of its catalog, the festival provided a vibrant platform to showcase its extensive archive. This collection houses over 2,500 Italian and French film scores, featuring iconic soundtracks for Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" and "8½," as well as Michael Radford's "Il Postino." Andrea Fabrizi, the company's global archive and restoration lead, curated several popular sessions designed to let the archive "speak for itself." His approach combined listening sessions, DJ sets, and talks to give audiences, in his words, "a complete view on that specific historic moment through the music," while also demonstrating its enduring influence. This rich repository continues to inspire contemporary creators; directors like Quentin Tarantino and musicians such as Drake and Tyler, the Creator frequently sample from its tracks.

A central theme of the festival was the monumental legacy of Ennio Morricone, the legendary composer behind Sergio Leone's "Dollars Trilogy" and the unforgettable score for "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." The program featured an exclusive preview of previously unreleased recordings from "Il Clan dei Siciliani," ahead of their December release on triple vinyl and double CD. It also included a tribute concert by Morricone's longtime collaborator, pianist Enrico Pieranunzi, and in-depth discussions exploring the Maestro's profound impact on modern cinema and music sampling. Fabrizi highlighted Piero Piccioni’s score for "Il Caso Mattei" as a particularly noteworthy rediscovery—a pioneering early-1970s work that masterfully blended jazz, political tension, and minimalism, thereby quietly revolutionizing the language of film music.

The French segment of the archive was spotlighted by A&R and restoration lead Stéphane Lerouge, who emphasized its stylistic diversity, from avant-garde pieces to South American-inspired grooves. His team is currently focused on reviving the cult thriller score "La Scoumoune" by François de Roubaix. They successfully located and digitized the original studio masters, enabling the first comprehensive definitive release, which will include the composer's personal annotations. For Lerouge, this painstaking restoration underscores the universal power of film music. He recalled Morricone once telling him he never learned foreign languages because "music language is universal"—a conviction proven by the dedicated followings these scores still command in Japan and the United States decades after their creation.

The concept of universality was a recurring topic in SLAM's headline conversations with industry leaders. Mary Ramos, Quentin Tarantino's longtime music supervisor, detailed her collaborative process, which often begins with a "yes-and playlist" to establish a film's sonic identity. She shared anecdotes from her long-standing partnership with Tarantino, including the instance where she persuaded him to commission original songs for the first time in "Django Unchained." Ramos explained constructing that soundtrack around themes of love and revenge, a process that involved coaching John Legend to send a cassette and handwritten letter and creatively merging James Brown's "The Payback" with unreleased Tupac vocals for the film's climactic gunfight. As filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn noted during his panel, while AI presents powerful new creative tools, the greater danger lies in economic inequality when "technology diminishes human hands," jeopardizing the financial structures that sustain artists. This sentiment was perfectly captured by Lerouge as the festival concluded: "A composer is an artist reacting to the work of another artist — and no machine can replace that human spark."