10 Essential Library Music Records
Originally created for soundtrack and commercial purposes, these weird and wonderful records are a sample hunter’s dream.
Don’t let the dowdy name fool you — library music has produced some of the most exciting sounds ever. Also known as production music, library music originated in 1927 with the London-based company Music De Wolfe, but its peak ran from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. Library music consists of recordings cut by skilled session musicians that can be licensed for use in films, TV, radio, ads, and other media. Libraries offer music to customers at a lower rate than it would cost them to create their soundtracks and cues.
Up until the ’90s, library music often wasn’t released commercially. Once it became available to the public, collectors scooped up the most coveted titles; the records’ scarcity drove up prices on the used market. Contemporary labels that have done exemplary jobs reissuing crucial library music titles include Aguirre. They’ve turned on a new generation of listeners to the genre’s splendors.
By necessity, library music possesses a practical quality, but it paradoxically has yielded some of the most adventurous and innovative sounds, as well. Many examples have come from Italian, British, French, and German libraries.
Below, you’ll find a list of essential library music releases that every record collector should have in their collection.
Cecil Leuter
Pop Électronique (1969)
Recorded during the height of the Moogspoitation trend, Cecil Leuter (also known as Roger Roger — his real name), this album is a beggar’s banquet for wild hip-hop and electronic music samples.
The first side’s full of frantic party jams that are nearly too fun; the flipside gets weirder and more abstract as it goes, ending in a maddening labyrinth of synth blitzes, oscillations, and intense conga slaps. It’s incredible to realize that Leuter was in his late 50s when he conceived these madcap tunes.
Maria Teresa Luciani
Suoni Di Una Città (Sounds Of The City) (1972)
Exactly what metropolis sounds like the supernatural strangeness of Zoviet .
Throughout the LP, Luciani portrays various everyday facets of cities as sources of mystery and wonder. Although released in 1972, the music here sounds utterly contemporary, awash in rare atmospheres, triggering seldom-felt emotions, redefining the term “concrete jungle.” Finders Keepers‘ 2017 reissue substantially raised the profile of this rare gem.
Nick Ingman
Big Beat (1973)
An album so good and influential, a short-lived British electronic-music movement was named after it in the ’90s. The Diana Ross, among many others.
Jay Richford & Gary Stevan
Feelings (1974)
Composed by Italian library luminaries Sandro Brugnolini under pseudonyms, Feelings has endured as a favorite of heads for five decades. Its ten sumptuously produced tracks encom orchestral soul, thriller-movie soundtracks, bossa nova, blaxploitation-flick funk, psych-rock, and florid jazz-fusion. And the luxuriantly funky “Feeling Tense” presages trip-hop by almost 20 years.
Keith Papworth
Antonio Valotti
Blackout (1975)
Here’s a merciless plunge into sinister, quasi-gothic horror that would give the toughest Blackout is overdue for a reissue.
Klaus Weiss Rhythm & Sounds
Time Signals (1978)
German drummer and synthesist Niagara, whose drum beats constitute some of the funkiest jams ever laid down in Europe.
Joël Vandroogenbroeck
Biomechanoïd (1980)
The nexus of science fiction and horror figures heavily in library music, and Marc Monsen, this album evokes alien bodily functions, cauldrons of mysterious, viscous liquids, toxic winds, computers going haywire, and other bizarre phenomena.
As with many library records, Biomechanoïd features brief track descriptions on its back cover. The one for “Plastic Gnome” speaks volumes: “clownish, discordant, android, heavy.” Well, then… pump up the volume! Bless Aguirre Records for reissuing this crucial document in 2014.
I MARC 4
Nelson Psychout (2017)
The Italian quartet Nelson Psychout get right to the point with expanding your mind and enhancing your trip—potent hallucinogens with no ill side effects.
Giuliano Sorgini
Africa Oscura (2018)
Library music was a male-dominated, Eurocentric field whose practitioners sometimes took liberties with other cultures’ music. This wasn’t done with malicious intent, but rather to expand the parameters of recordings suitable for films and television shows dedicated to those regions and peoples. One outstanding example is Zoo Folle soundtrack, Africa Oscura goes heavy on hypnotic hand percussion patterns, eerie synth emissions, and animal and bird sounds. That this evocative collection tailored for documentaries about Africa went unreleased for over 40 years boggles the mind.
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