Unusual Sounds is a deep dive into an unfamiliar musical universe – and is part of the renaissance and current reissue movement of library music. In the heyday of low-budget television and scrappy genre filmmaking, producers who needed a soundtrack for their commercial entertainments could reach for a selection of library music – LPs of stock recordings to fit any mood or situation.
The use of such records was mostly for cost-cutting when certain productions couldn’t afford to hire their own composer. Library publishers became major financial successes in the end and much of their work is now being revisited and celebrated. In fact, many of these anonymous or pseudonymous scores-on-demand were crafted by the some of the greatest musical minds of the late 20th century. Many expert musicians and innovative composers revelled in the freedoms offered, paradoxically, by this most corporate of fields.
The forthcoming compilation is the perfect companion to the David Hollander curated book Unusual Sounds: The Hidden History of Library Music is out now on Anthology Editions, with the 20 tracks out on November 9th. It encapsulates the niche and fascinating subculture of library music. Genre splicing music and the astonishingly complex hybrids can today be found in cartoons, video games and sampled by the likes of Jay-Z, DANGER DOOM and Gnarls Barkley, as well as scores to films by Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson.
This compilation includes compositions by Brainticket founder Joel Vandroogenbroeck, KPM Allstars John Cameron and Keith Mansfield, Montenegrin-born composer Janko Nilović, and the Italian film composer Stefano Torossi – among many others on this choice selection.
David Hollander (pictured below) is a producer, music supervisor, writer and collector living in Texas. A lifelong record collector, his library music collection is considered by many to be one of the finest of its kind in the world.
Tracklist:
1. Keith Mansfield – Funky Fanfare
2. Stefano Torossi – Running Fast (track not available digitally)
3. D. Patucchi – La Dimostrazione
4. Klaus Weiss – Survivor
5. Janko Nilovic – Xenos Cosmos
6. V. Geminiani – Ophis Le Serpentaire
7. Stringtronics – Tropicola
8. Stefano Torossi – Feeling Tense (track not available digitally)
9. Gary Pacific Orchestra – Soft Wind
10. John Cameron – Half Forgotten Daydreams
11. F. Micalizzi – Night Breeze
12. Les Hurdle, Kathleen Poppy & Madeline Bell – You’ve Got What It Takes
13. Electric Machine – Fancy Good
14. C. Cordio & F. Vinciguerra – Quips and Cranks
15. Les Hurdle & Frank Ricotti – Dissolves
16. Joel Vandroogenbroeck & Walt Rockman – Fairy Tale
17. Mladen Franko – Weeping Eelgrass
18. Peter Patzer – Mild Maniac
19. Joel Vandroogenbroeck & Marc Monsen – Group Meditation
20. Roland Hollinger – Dream Number Two
Burundian-born J.P. Bimeni has a voice like Otis Redding and is celebrating the release of his debut album Free Me on Tucxone Records. A descendant of the Burundian royal family, Bimeni fled his country aged 15 during the 1993 civil war. His story is unique – three attempts were made on his life. At school he watched his schoolmates being murdered, he was chased by motorcycle militia-men and poisoned by doctors in hospital. Finally, he fled to the UK after being given refugee status.
Free Me is out now and details of his gig, at Ronnie Scott’s, are pictured below on the flier.
For Bimeni, music is a way to survive: “You can’t entertain the pain of your problems all the time – you have to put them away and let something else fill the space where it’s just been pain, worry and terror,” he says. “It’s my dream to return to Burundi one day – but I always remember that getting shot enabled me to meet the world.”
This is a track from Felbm’s debut album – Tape 1/Tape 2 – released by Soundway out today.
Felbm is Eelco Topper, previously known as Falco Benz. Tape 1/Tape 2 displays Topper’s versatility as a musician as he eases between genres, moods and styles. This album is completely Topper’s work and you can hear him playing every instrument on each blissful composition. This sits nicely alongside Topper’s electronic music productions and this new ambient direction will delight and surprise his fans.
Nova Materia release a debut album of ‘electronic desert music’ for the ever trusty Crammed Discs.
The duo of Caroline Chaspoul from France and Eduardo Henriquez from Chile formed three years ago, born out of the ashes of alternative rock group, Panico. The duo’s It Comes LP builds on sounds and influences gathered during a 2010 trek by the band across northern Chile.
Caroline says: “We definitely wanted to get rid of the conventional way of performing music and didn’t want to use conventional instruments. The idea was to integrate geography to the core of the composition process.” On using stones found on the trip as instruments, Eduardo says: “They bring harmonics you wouldn’t think of when using conventional instruments. Also they are chaotic and unpredictable.”
The duo’s performances are described as “primal and futuristic”. Their sound has developed from their 2015 debut Aparece en sueños, where the duo evolved their industrial and coldwave tendencies with krautrock, shoegaze, and funk. BPitch Control’s Chlóe is cited as a direct influence on their music and the duo worked with Chlóe again to produce two eccentric techno/house tracks, such as ON/AV found on the new album.
The album is out now and they are performing at The Waiting Room in London on November 13th.
Liraz is influenced by Iran’s female musical icons of the 1970s – like Googoosh and Ramesh – and her debut album Naz is as fiery and defiant. She sings in Farsi, on an album dominated lyrically by the role of women in society and musically by the bounce of hip-hop and electronica. It is produced by Rejoicer (Yuvi Havkin), an Israeli beats, jazz and electronica artist who released an album on Stones Throw in August.
Liraz is driven by the diverse assemblage of stories which make up her heritage and her music has mobilised a campaign around women’s rights. Raised in Tel Aviv in Israel, her parents are from Iran yet political circumstances have meant that she’s never been able to visit, following the 1979 revolution. She is also a successful actor in both Israel and Hollywood, acting with the likes of Philip Seymour-Hoffman (A Late Quartet) and Naomi Watts (Fair Game). It was in LA that Liraz heard music she could relate to and express herself through.
“Persians have these nice, polite manners of being like an Iranian woman,” she says. “You have to be good to your husband, good to your family, very polite… this is the only way I knew.” By way of illustrating her point, Liraz refers to the career of legendary pop singer Googoosh. It was in her music that she first saw a public image of a female Iranian swaggering with confidence, opening her eyes to this dusted-over lineage of public female figures in Iran. “But after the revolution, Googoosh was forced to stop singing, eventually leaving Iran so that she could keep singing outside her homeland,” Liraz says. “It’s a reflection of the newly-restricted role for female musicians in the revolution’s aftermath – and for female singers in particular, who are prohibited from performing solo for male audiences.”
The role of women in society is ever present in her lyrics. In Nozi Nozi she presents the idea of an Iranian archetype of a sweetly-smiling wife, subtly trying to wrestle what she wants out of her husband. Several of the tracks are covers of Iranian artists, like Hala Bavar, a version of one of Googoosh’s songs, pondering inner turmoil and how it relates to daily reality.
Collaborating with producer Rejoicer, also based in Tel Aviv, has created a fusion of Iran’s gamut of traditional instruments and a chemistry of hypnotic songs and heavy-weight beats.
The complete Ian Carr and Don Rendell Lansdowne recording sessions have a full and unprecedented boxset reissue from Jazzman Records on November 16th. They have been remastered from the original analogue master tapes at Abbey Road Studios and will come with replica artwork, design and paper stock.
This project has been 20 years in the making and this labour of love has received extra special care – even by Jazzman’s lofty standards. The booklet contains never before seen photographs, interviews with the remaining living band members and liner notes from BBC Radio 3 presenter and award-winning jazz writer Alyn Shipton.
The five albums – Shades Of Blues (1965), Dusk Fire (1966), Phase III (1968), Change Is (1969) and Live (1969) – have reached almost mythical status in the collector’s world. The collective second hand market value comes to an astonishing £6,000.
The quest to bring these remarkable recordings back to life connects with the beginning of the life of the label Jazzman Records. It was 1998 when a young ‘Jazzman’ Gerald put in a request to Universal Music to license for reissue one of his all time favourite records, Dusk Fire, by Don Rendell and Ian Carr Quintet. He had got lucky a few years before and found a lone copy at a New York Record Fair. British jazz records were not nearly as sought after or as popular outside of the UK, and unaware of it’s hefty price tag, a vendor sold him a copy for just $12. The plan was for this to be the first reissue LP on Gerald’s newly formed Jazzman record label. That plan was scuppered though.
So what’s taken so long? The 20 year wait is finally over, but the time taken was even with the knowledge that these albums were owned by Universal. Gerald’s initial request to them was denied as the company was unable to locate the original paperwork and could not direct the enquiry appropriately. Gerald persevered, but failed for many years. Eventually a friend took a job at Universal and from then it took two years to find the right department, locate the paperwork amongst many thousands of others in their archives and finally seal the deal.
The Don Rendell/Ian Carr Quintet played together for seven years and made a plethora of deeply melodic, post-bop British jazz compositions that later on took influences from Indo and more spiritually guided jazz. Produced by Denis Preston and recorded at his Lansdowne Studios, Preston was a legend in his own right, responsible for many Trinidadian calypso records from young Caribbean immigrants arriving in London in the 1950s and ’60s, as well as working with other renowned jazz musicians like Jamaican Joe Harriott and Indian Amancio D’Silva.
The band was primarily made up of saxophonist Don Rendell, trumpeter and composer Ian Carr, and pianist and composer Michael Garrick. It was Garrick who was influenced by Indian, African and Middle Eastern music that gave the band their otherworldly sound. The addition of Ghanaian percussionist Guy Warren on their final album Change was a catalyst to the band’s dissolution as “not everyone took to him”. Ian Carr went on to form the legendary jazz-rock band Nucleus, while Rendell and Garrick furthered their jazz careers with their own solo projects.
“They were five guys putting forward their ideas in music,” according to Jazzman Gerald. “It became especially interesting when Michael Garrick joined. The combination of personalities just worked; Ian Carr was the driving force, Michael Garrick the main writer and Don Rendell was the experienced career musician. They were a brilliant team who pushed the boundaries to create their own identifiable sound.”Click here to go to the Jazzman Records website.
