Johan Agebjörn and Fred Ventura are back on these Vehlinggo pages with an exclusive song premiere that you will find quite easy to replay many times ahead of its Friday, Oct. 2, release. “My Only One,” from Agebjörn’s forthcoming album, Casablanca Nights 2: The Unveiled Chapter, finds Italo Disco legend Ventura and Italo Disco revivalist legend Agebjörn (one-half of Sally Shapiro) unleashing a beautiful, propulsive mid-tempo banger that makes me wish they’d do a full collab LP.
Ventura’s devotional, romantic vocals flow captivatingly over Agebjörn’s bottom-heavy rhythms and mind-opening synthscapes and melodies. I can’t count how many times I’ve listened to it already. Now’s your chance to get an early experience before everyone else on Friday.
Casablanca Nights 2 also features previously released collaborations with Yota, NINA, Little Boots, Tom Hooker, R. Missing, and Ryan Paris, along with additional pairings with Bunny X, Dana Jean Phoenix, Ellen Andrea Wang, and Mikael Ögren. The album comes out on Oct. 30 in both digital and gorgeous blue vinyl forms via Blanco y Negro Music. (Don’t sleep on that opaque, blue-marbled physical, dear readers.) Of course, you can always pre-order the album right now.
Talking about “My Only One,” Agebjörn told Vehlinggo that Ventura is “one of few original italo disco artists who are still taking new directions for italo, while still being true to the original spirit of the sound.”
“I sent him the instrumental of ‘My Only One’ last year, a result of some jamming on my Yamaha keyboard, and when I first heard his vocals some months later, it felt like being in Northern Italy in 1985. I love it,” Agebjörn said.
Sweden-based Agebjörn and Italy-based Ventura were actually both performers at the Halvoya Festival in Kristiansand, Norway, this summer, and Ventura’s Italoconnection bandmate Paolo Gozzetti shot a short clip of the collaborators performing it. (Check it out on YouTube Shorts.)
Ventura praised working with Agebjörn, with whom he first collaborated back in 2011 on “Alice,” a killer Sally Shapiro-Ventura-Le Prix number that featured on the first Casablanca Nights that same year.
“I’m really drawn to his Nordic sound and the effortless immediacy of his music,” Ventura said. “The moment I heard the track for the first time, a vocal idea came to me naturally, something simple, direct and immediate — just like the song itself.”
Ventura is no stranger to these pages. I interviewed him back in 2015, and have premiered his work in subsequent years.
This likely won’t be the last release in the Casablanca Nights series. Agebjörn has said he’d like to release these “and friends” albums each decade until he retires. In the meantime, catch “My Only One” everywhere on Friday, and the CN 2 album later this month.
