This is a CD to go with a book about that library music there used to be. It’s about curios, you see? So here we have another sense of curios. I like the Rolling Stones, say, but it’s just such a thing from another time for me. Curio. This is probably more directly obviously a curio. Library music. Curio.
Right, well, so — what happens here is that it’s composition with a very different shape, a different purpose. Because the “thing” of library music is to kind of sitting around, waiting to get picked up for TV show, film, radio, theatre or whatever, it doesn’t have the same economy as pop music, or what’d normally be understood by composition. There’s a track on here, D Patucchi‘s “La Dimostrazione”, which slinks in under two minutes of establishing a theme and then disappearing into some table-hammering suspenseful thing. It’s library music, so there’s no need to develop a theme to death, so a lot of what’s happening here is establishing an idea and then moving on.
What this does mean though is that it takes a bit of concentrating — there’s plenty of noticeable tropes: the funky interlude (Keith Mansfield‘s “Funky Fanfare”), the jazzy escape scene that for some reason turns into some operatic death on the edge of a cliff (Janko Nilovic‘s “Xenos Cosmos”)… it’s all evocative, but less in a “let’s bathe in opulence” sense of evocative, and more in the sense of seriously cramming a load of compositional ideas, often discontinuously, into a given piece. Something this immediately brings to mind is that it’s a record for diggers — you can hear every DJ I’ve ever known’s ears prick up for sample hoarding with most of this collection. Wonky Rhodes organs (Stefano Torossi‘s “Feeling Tense”), clear funky drum fills to lift (Gary Pacific Orchestra‘s “Soft Wind”). Though having said that, this is an odd collection in that it makes me think of that time in the late ’90s where everyone had a sampler and a Stereolab record and was ploughing through Les Baxter and James Chance sides for that perfect swoopy violin sound. John Cameron‘s “Half Forgotten Day” spreads that sort of louche easy listening, Francis Lai drunk on reverb vibe all over your grill. Electric Machine‘s “Fancy Good” is immediately so familiar that I assume that someone’s already half-inched it for something or other.So there we are. What have we learnt today? We’ve learnt that curios come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. And aren’t we all rather lucky that they do? Yes, that’ll do.
-Kev Nickells-
