With explosions of popularity in both broadcast television and genre filmmaking at the end of the 1960s, the demand grew for inexpensive soundtracks, incidental music, themes, and other such easily accessible sounds to score the floods of new media being produced. Library music filled this role, offering a library of sounds prefabricated for use in film and categorized by mood, tempo, genre, or instrumentation. The companies that produced these libraries of pre-recorded sounds hired composers and players for sessions where volumes of generic music were recorded, offering a far cheaper alternative to creating original music for any given production. Often fast and loose sessions with little creative restriction, the pressure for commercial appeal was off for those involved in generating library music.
Unusual Sounds: The Hidden History of Library Music collects some of the most interesting moments from this already fascinating category of music, zooming in on wild ideas, futuristic instrumentation, and otherwise out-there examples of this craft. The 20 tracks here highlight why library music took on new forms of influence and excitement in the years after its heyday. Largely instrumental and pressed to LPs for prospective clients to browse before purchasing, library records became coveted treasures early on in hip hop and sample-based music. Unhinged, feral grooves like D. Patucchi's "La Dimostrazione" sound customized for future beats by
Dr. Dre, moving from lazy drum breaks to psychedelic string sections. Entire generations of experimental indie rock would borrow from library music as well. It's hard not to think of
Broadcast when hearing the drum sound and spare synth on
Klaus Weiss' heavy-hitting instrumental "Survivor," or catch the same carefree vibe of
Stereolab's space-age pop on
John Cameron's "Half Forgotten Daydreams." Outliers featuring vocals are every bit as alien as their instrumental counterparts, as with the weird, vaguely western tone of
Stefano Torossi's "Feeling Tense" or the vacant, cookie-cutter disco of "You've Got What It Takes" by
Les Hurdle, Kathleen Poppy &
Madeline Bell.
Unusual Sounds curates a cross-section of tracks that exemplify how library music could be gloriously corny, off-the-wall, or legitimately groundbreaking on any given track. Synth banger "Quips and Cranks" from a 1980 album by the same name by Italian composers
Cordio & Franco Vinciguerra is a tapestry of analog electronic flutters and wild grooves that sound both ahead of their time and outside of time completely. With some of the best and most interesting flashes of library music's colossal archives,
Unusual Sounds offers a look at an arcane avenue of music that will engage those previously unfamiliar and well-versed fans. ~ Fred Thomas