Review: Back in the 60s and 70s, library music exploded as a genre. It saw plenty of talented musicians make extra cash by laying down endless instrumental grooves for use in TV, film and radio. The King Underground label is now digging into the vast vaults for a new series of releases of some of the finest sounds from the era. The first 45 features tracks considered to be 'dramatic' from John Scott and Tony Kinsey. Scott's 'Milky Way' opens up with cosmic chords and sweeping strings that take you to the stars while 'Star Voyage' has a more busy lead. Kinsey's 'Kaleidoscope' builds the tension with multiple movements from several instruments.
Review: 'Warlock' is the latest release to be pushed via Bob Stanley's Measured Mile imprint, and pulls two floor-friendly but still retrospective gems from the storied De Wolfe music library, based in the UK and widely known as the progenitor and originator of what has now become known widely as library music. To demonstrate the gestation times common to this corner of the music industry, these two tracks have never been heard before, and yet were recorded in 1983! First comes Reg Tilsley with 'Warlock', a full yet light-winged flight through linns of flute, funk bass and notes inegales. Meanwhile, 'Flashpoint' by Roger Jackson is a space-age tittup of booming, long-tailed proportions; it's tempered by the nagging nip of a clavichord and the formidable frown of the lowest piano note.
Review: British library musician and composer Alan Tew has one of his many magnum opuses, Drama Suite Part II, reissued by KPM. With the label keen to flaunt its first edition's going rate on Discogs, Tew's follow-up to the first part is a holy grail for library music collectors, owing to its performative subtlety, breadth of mood, and doubtless bottling of several modish styles of the time: noir, dark jazz, explotiation theme music. The track 'Stonechange' in particular hears many coded rerubs, with many versions and sub-versions, as was of the factual, rationalistic and methodical approach to the library music of the 1970s and early 80s. It's also got an indelibly clean sound: as with all KPM reissues, the audio for Drama Suite Part II comes from the original analogue tapes and has been remastered for vinyl by Be With regular Simon Francis.
Review: 'Available Forms' is the latest masterwork of the musical project Tobor Experiment, led by Giorgio Sancristoforo, an Italian sound artist and music software designer based in Milan. Active since 2007, Sancristoforo's work has largely centred on highly technical odysseys in avant-disco, exploring surreal takes on the ambivalent promises made by the tide of technological advancement, channelled into a that has been described, perhaps quite cleverly, as 'moogsploration'. Coming after a 12-year hiatus on gatefold LP, Sancristoforo returns to his go-to label Bear Funk for yet another foray into this retro-modernist vision, mixing genre-bent jazz, electronica, nu-disco, and psychedelic influences.
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