The cosmic stuff that it overlapped with (tho there was something adversarial between the scenes too, defined in opposition to...) was its beardy older brother; spacey and proggy, often slower, eclectic in a proto-Balearic sort of a way, World Sounds Volume 12 sample sets...
Tho I would insist that Italo's relative simplicity and formulaity is feature rather than bug, the source of its unaffected charm. Especially now (and especially in the case of some of these with the videos)... all that retro-futurist optimism more poignant than ever, time capsules from Tony Benn's MinTech, sleek fuck-yous to Il Sorpasso... an attitude now lamentably deceased, replaced by the alleged maturity of endless grey dystopias, and unironic keening for the years of outside bogs and dying from tonsillitis, that hopefulness and confidence surviving only in the debased, zombified form of Google and their ilk, hiding their cyclopean horror behind a cutesy logo.