Library Music (Sound Library/Production Music/Soundtrack Music) - 1960s-1980s - A Mirror World of Funk/Jazz/Psych/Pop

For me the great library music moment will always be Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where Neil Innes's initial soundtrack was replaced by DeWolfe library music -- and it's so brilliantly done, I can't think of any of those cuts as being anything but actual soundtrack creations for the movie, even when they're not.

For me the great library music moment will always be Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where Neil Innes's initial soundtrack was replaced by DeWolfe library music

huh !!?
so if i dig out my never played soundtrack cd from the archive it will be all library music ?

(i was EMI mailing list for a while, and they sent me 2 complete sets of the full MP albums, 2 sets of skinny cd-rs, and i still never played the bloody things! hence i totally understood guy hands quote re shoving money in envelopes would have been cheaper and more beneficial)

The Holy Grail album isn't a traditional soundtrack -- it's a (very funny) meta-riff on seeing the movie in a theater with all sorts of things done specifically and solely for that, interpersed with bits from the film.

time to head to the archive then.

is there actually an entire unreleased neil innes soundtrack for "holy grail"? i thought he just did a couple songs for it...

It may not be a full soundtrack as such, but as I remember it it was a combination of Innes doing a variety of medieval-ish compositions -- think his "Brave Sir Robin" song as the surviving example but also just soundtrack music in general -- as well as a notably grimy and 'real' sound design IIRC. Whatever it exactly was, they switched to the DeWolfe approach and it was genius.

Best thread

Library music is a regular feature on Evan Crankshaw's great Explorers Room wfmu digital radio show, and coincidentally with this thread's reappearance, this week's program was a three-hour exploration of the "Chappell Mood Music Library"... Show is archived with playlist and comments

http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/77442

Yeah Evan crankshaw is the guy behind the Flash Strap blog where you can download the stupendous Bibliotheque Exotique library music mix/virtual box.

Mr. Crankshaw's blog generally and the 'Biblio Exotique' series specifically look fantastic! Thanks for the recommendation!

Some overlap, but not a lot, between his series and my 'Les Bibliothecaires' series--between the two is a pretty good intro to Library!

Library Records (a slow moving thread)

we had this thread but this new one is pretty cool. I like Don Voegeli. I bought a Piero Umiliani box but the records were warped, so I returned it, and that's been my experience with library records, mostly. I guess I've heard a handful of boring ones. The good ones are expensive.

Soundslike I have listened to three 'sides' of your box so far (starting with Mystery naturally) -- GREAT work

Thanks, Jon! I really enjoyed the "sides" approach--making lots of 25-min-ish mixes meant themes could be really honed and varied, and hopefully makes jumping in easier.

I listen to a shitload of contemporary library music for my job (which is editing TV promos).

It's hard not to wonder if 30 years on these tracks will ooze as much sonic weirdness as the best vintage 60s/70s stuff.

At the moment it mostly feels incredibly bland and utilitarian but I'm sure a lot of the coveted stuff of the "golden age" felt the same way too.

as a side thing i used to edit videos and have done a number for corporate/non-profit promos and finding the music was always a huge challenge for me. bg music has to have an element of the ambient to it - it has to slip by unnoticed. i got to know stock & royalty-free music websites very well. tbh most of the rock tracks reminded me either of U2 (epic stadium delayed guitar) or Colplay (epic stadium but w piano arpeggios). at one point i tried writing bg music thinking, oh, this will be easy. it's not! the music called too much attention to itself, or it gave the overlying video and weird and morose quality. it is a different skillset to compose for stock music vs. other music.

i feel the same way about the blandness of modern stock music but also the sheer volume of it all, it is too much to trawl through for one human. thousands of "morning sunrise" or "motivational" cues to listen to, likely entire genres of stock music people just never dig into because they are niche and producers want a safer choice. you can't really blame them, why spend a week searching for that diamond in the rough when you can find a soundtrack in an hour of searching (sometimes, budget-wise, this is a necessity). it makes sense that it took 30-40 years of trawling through the soupy stuff to find the gems.

a little off track but one of my friends posted a terrible "uncut" cover story from last year of something like "the 101 weirdest albums ever!" i have a great love for hacky listicles, they're one of my guilty pleasures, but this one was awful because it was the exact same article you would've seen 15 years ago but with a lil b record thrown in there.

the past changes on us, i guess the less romantic way to say it is that our understanding of the past, of all aspects of it, continually changes and evolves, and the internet specifically has accelerated that, culturally speaking, by what seems like an order of magnitude. it wasn't really feasible to know or be into library music before the internet because you need some sort of mass collective human data processing ability, the ability to not just access but listen to hundreds of records with identical covers and point out which ones are of interest.

my unending obsession with '70s music isn't properly nostalgia (for a decade that ended when i was three), if it's nostalgia at all it's nostalgia for an age that never existed, but it's more excavation, "digging" if you will, to find the hidden and unacknowledged aspects of who we were and who we are. more than a simple matter of aesthetic preference, "forest of evil vol. 1" is more experientially interesting to me than "anthony's song". not that i don't like "anthony's song".

It's an interesting distinction, between nostalgia and "digging". I'm also largely obsessed with music of the 70s, and I'd make a similar case that this isn't nostalgia--partly on the basis that I was born in 1980, but more significantly that it grew organically from constant (real-life and internet) discovery of the music itself often with little to no interest in the 70s more broadly (fashion, architecture, pop culture in particular being of little to negative interest for me). In other words, through "digging" the music is experienced as directly, or maybe more directly with less coloring by context (for better and worse) than even current music. I feel like for music obsessives, "new-to-me" tends to be more important than "actually new"; a nostalgia-based or retro-mania based obsession would be driven by other motivations and would manifest itself more obviously (i.e. dressing like your favorite antique subculture, a narrowing rather than broadening of interests).

It's why I've been happy that I named my mix blog as generically as "Musicphilia," because it biases no constraints--nothing stops me from making funk series, post-punk boxes, mixes of actually-new music, Library sets, and weird collage pieces. That reflects the way we listen. I always just figured, why ahould we think there's something so special about just one moment--the present--when thanks to recorded sound a century of music remains "present" and if it wasn't ephemeral it can still move and engage us.

Library exists in a strange limbo, because even the weirdest stuff still feels of-a-time that clearly isn't our own, but aside from a few tunes that became theme songs almost none of it can be remembered nostalgically from first-time experience. The fact that it tends to be off someone's radar and then discovered as a huge mass of sound all at once (relatively speaking) only amplifies the odd blend of clearly-past but totally-new. In the end I think it, like all music found through agnostic, eclectic digging, stands on its own merit musically, and everything else about it is just interesting but secondary.

yeah i think that's an important point, so much of nostalgia is a kind of gestalt thing, you like the music because it reminds you of Your Past in its entirety. when i listen to music from the '70s i dissociate it from that context and recontextualize it in my own life. a lot of the hatred of disco, for instance, was a hatred of disco culture. i don't hate disco culture, but i do have a rather aggressive disinterest in its trappings - long nights, casual sex, cocaine, even _dancing_, these things are not really part of my life and have not ever been, and i didn't really start enjoying disco until i stopped, in my mind, associating the music with those things. i would argue that if there is any music that approximates "timeless" it's music that can reveal meanings in multiple cultural contexts across long periods of time, and that music's success in its original cultural context is not necessarily a good determinant of that. (but probably it will eventually all lose its meaning.)

this is the most library music thing i've heard this morning. utterly cheezy brass fanfare for a minute and then it goes into an utterly crazy guitar freakout. and then back to the brass fanfare as if that was just a normal, ordinary part of the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3h_K2AIjss

Wow. I overlooked this thread! I've a massive soft spot for this stuff. You had me at "Alessandro Alessandroni...Piero Umiliani...Nino Nardini" etc. Downloading now. Thanks Soundslike!

i'm just going to rando bump until this thread falls off the front page

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqW-I6zPKJQ

Thank you, Nag!

And keep sharing, Ziggy! So endless--right after I finished the box I found a huge cache of records somebody must've populated an ancient blog with, that I'd completely forgotten about for years, so who knows, maybe more volumes one day ;)

soundslike, thanks so much for this. actually, all of your mixes are great. thanks for being so great.

and here's a topically-named cut from one of my all-time fav library records:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prehOsA73_Y

It occurs to me that there must be at least a few library records - or at least pieces from them - which were never used by anyone for any project ever and thus remained ‘music for pleasure’ only

It occurs to me that there must be at least a few library records - or at least pieces from them - which were never used by anyone for any project ever and thus remained ‘music for pleasure’ only

i have a modern library album that i dont think has ever been picked up by anyone - made by part of hans zimmers crew.
it could even have some witch house style stuff on it as its been a couple of years since i heard it.

which zimmerite?

stephen hilton.
used to be part of david holmes crew (free association), and then flykller.
he made a proper library album, and sorted me a copy out ...
dont think i have ever listened to it properly, but cos of this thread i have now added it to the archive.

huh i don't know that name but there are a lot of ppl in that posse

he is a studio guru who tried the popstar thing for a while.

we stole this riff (from tim buckley)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbAsp3UVBzg

I've been playing memories of love a lot. Great sequencing and transitions - A+

Thanks! I tried to make each "side" of each "record" have a somewhat unique sound/vibe, at least for each grouping of years (so there are three total crime-drama-ish ones, say). Hadn't really had any feedback about particular favorite individual mixes, so I really appreciate that you're digging that aspect!

I think 'The Beat,' 'The Sophisticate,' 'California Gold,' 'Winter Sunrise,' 'High Score' and the two 'The Hero' sets have been my faves--but I made sure there were at least a few of my all-time-favorite tracks on each set.

Shame about the lame generic art, since the record had a fantastically fun cover. . . But Jacques Sioul's 'Midway' album has really stuck with me as one of the best "album-like" Library records:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWqS2d5K-uA

https://ring.cdandlp.com/princethorens/photo_grande/114595182.jpg

For anybody who's ever really gotten bit by the library bug, there's a new book out that's a great combination of interviews with participants from its heyday, label overviews, and great covers (similar to the Johnny Trunk book but rather a lot more in-depth):

'Unusual Sounds' by David Hollander on Anthology

Buy here: https://shop.mexicansummer.com/product/david-hollander-unusual-sounds/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHJz81Q0MW0

at a thrift store i found vol. 2, 3, and 4 of Música Popular Do Nordeste, a four-volume documentation of the popular music of Northeast Brazil. there are lots of different styles featured. it is a wonderful set!

The KPM All-Stars return. Also a new film on library music by Shawn Lee:

https://www.bl.uk/events/kpm-talk-and-late

thanks for reminding me of this shawn lee album I have in the archive :

http://www.theaquarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/09-12-Discs-Shawn-Lee-Synthesizers-in-Space.jpg

Brief feature and interview with the guy who put together 'Unusual Sounds' - stick to the end for a gallery of pages from the book:
https://thevinylfactory.com/features/unusual-sounds-library-music-records/

My friend Robert bought the book so I had a read of some of it and skimmed the rest. It's pretty exhaustive about KPM, with plenty of quotes from the key players. Once it roams beyond the UK however it gets increasingly sketchy and reliant on the cover images.

There's a Library Music film premiering at the British Library this October, followed by the KPM All Stars. Tickets for the film are sold out but I think you can still get to the concert?

This is going to be great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgOMibjOJcw#

I didn't realize Shawn Lee was doing it! That's awesome--I first heard of him/bought his record sound-unheard stumbled upon solely because the cover was a direct homage to Bruton.

maybe i should listen to some more shawn lee, i heard "world of funk" when a co-worker recommended it to me and love it but have never delved deeper

So, was anyone here at the British Library yesterday?

I left it too late in the end for any of the events, but I am going to a talk tonight in King's Cross with Hawkshaw, Bennett and Cameron.

I would have loved to have been there--very jealous of anyone who was!

If anyone here did attend--how was the film??

I was working there and, going to and fro from the staff canteen, casting admiring glances at Alan Hawkshaw's organ.

Im coming to that- hyped!

Was just listening to hawkshaw- bruton- great mysteries of the world a few days ago

This is a total longshot, but here we go. . .

I had some compilations on vinyl in the late 90s (part of the same series) that were completely amazing, but I only used them for samples. I would like to be able to find those albums again, in hopes of maybe rediscovering some stuff.

Some further info: the music was a total mystery at the time, but I recognize it now as probably sound library and film soundtrack excerpts. Maybe Italian stuff mostly? No famously used samples or breakbeats; though tons of stuff yet to be mined in that regard. The covers had kind of stock "exotic" female models on them (in my memory the models are white; this could be inaccurate), overlayed with kind of art deco type designs, and a beige / jade type color combination. None of the artists were of any notoriety to me at the time, so no idea what even was on it. I just remember most of the songs were 3-4 minutes, except there were a couple that were really long (I'm thinking at least 10 minutes). Shit was insanely dope and it would be rad to find again.

Little help?

https://www.discogs.com/label/730186-Easy-Tempo-Series ?

or possibly https://www.discogs.com/label/865338-Beat-At-Cinecitt%C3%A0

Wow, those look excellent! Thank you!

Alas, no. None of those look familiar, unfortunately. Will comb through the tracklists for sure though. Thanks again!

see also https://www.discogs.com/label/416923-The-Mood-Mosaic

mookie, thank you for your vigiliance. i simply cannot recall what this series was. i went to amoeba yesterday and pestered the employees at both help counters to no avail. they did have some of those kpm albums, but that would have been settling and i must NOT settle, i must FIND my holy grail!

"the imperfection of memory"

so, i was kinda sorta way off in my memory of these comps, but i did actually manage to find them!

status breaks
status breaks volume two

there seems to be a couple sound library cuts on them, but it's mostly rare funk 45s. still dope as all get out, though.

Nick Ingman - throng

does actually someone really like the middle part after 1:15m? it sounds so displaced and as much i am trying to like, it makes me cringe. the groove itself is classic.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CEAHRwCpW3G

i would like someone to do an exploration of the remarks on library tracks, and how 50 years ago they were all like 'uptempo movement' and then later they became 'Driving drum groove and slick brass propel this motivating, self-assured cue; with funky synth-bass, vibrant Hammond organ intermissions, light percussion and warm, trumpet-solo-led breakdown at 1:44.'

also rip alan hawkshaw

the problem with using library music for your movies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGzz3hh1jHc

Is this the only thread marking Hawkshaw's passing? RIP my dude, you were an excellent composer.

He was feted for several posts on the rolling obituary thread