Library Music on Vinyl: A Starter's Guide
Library music was never supposed to reach you. These records were cut by specialist publishers for one purpose: shelves of licensed cues for film, TV, and radio editors, pressed in tiny runs, mailed to studios, and never sold in shops. Freed from the charts, the writers and session aces behind them recorded with total abandon, and the result is some of the most uninhibited music of the 20th century: cop-show funk, cosmic synth workouts, eerie electronics, and drum breaks that hip-hop has been mining for decades.
The ten records below are the ones we hand people first, every one a modern pressing we carry from the reissue labels doing the digging: Be With, Four Flies, and friends. Work through them and you will touch the great British libraries, the French and German catalogs, Italian TV jazz, one gloriously fake Japanese pop record, and the modern producers keeping the tradition alive. The library music collection is the bin to browse when these ten have you hooked.
Alan Hawkshaw & Brian Bennett - Synthesizer and Percussion (KPM Library) Vinyl LP
Start with the house that KPM built. Alan Hawkshaw wrote themes British television still hums, Countdown and Grange Hill among them, and Brian Bennett kept time for the Shadows; together, armed with early synthesizers and a drum kit, they cut one of the great head-to-head library sessions of the 70s. Funky, spacey, and decades ahead of its brief, it is the perfect first taste of the KPM sound. The same duo's Synthesis and Full Circle continue the conversation.
Alan Tew - Drama Suite Part I/1 (KPM Library) Vinyl LP
The most storied crime-show music never written for a crime show. Alan Tew's mid-70s Drama Suite sessions gave KPM a full library of tension, swagger, and chase, and the cues took on lives of their own: they scored the British series The Hanged Man, and "The Big One" later became the theme to The People's Court, which is why this record makes hip-hop heads and daytime TV viewers nod at the same moment. Part II/2 completes the set, and The Hunter (Drama Suite)/Adventure Story extends the same shadowy world.
John Cameron - Jazzrock (KPM Library) Vinyl LP
John Cameron scored the film Kes and co-founded CCS, and in between he walked into KPM's studio with London's best session players and cut Jazzrock, a record diggers speak about in lowered voices. It does exactly what the title promises: heavyweight jazz chops welded to rock rhythm, groove after groove built to be looped. This is the muscular end of the British library sound. Cameron's collaborations run deep here too: Afro Rock with guitarist Alan Parker and Voices in Harmony with KPM titan Keith Mansfield are both in the racks.
Barbara Moore - Bright and Shining Vinyl LP
The secret garden of the genre. Barbara Moore was British library music's great voice arranger, famous among collectors for her wordless vocal records, and Bright and Shining, cut in 1981 for the Sylvester Music library, is her masterpiece of what one admirer called happiness music: breezy, dreamy jazz-soul grooves crowned with those celestial male-female harmonies. Originals are nearly mythical; this reissue finally puts it back on shelves. Her earlier vocal library work, including the celebrated Vocal Shades and Tones, is worth asking about at the counter.
Pierre-Alain Dahan & Mat Camison - Rhythmiques (Tele Music Library) Vinyl LP
France ran its own library empire, and Tele Music was its funkiest wing. Rhythmiques puts drummer Pierre-Alain Dahan and keyboardist Mat Camison in a room with a simple assignment, rhythm beds for broadcast, and they answered with disco-funk grooves so tough the record has become a producer's open secret. This is French library at its most sample-ready. The follow-up Neo Rhythmiques and Dahan's Continental Pop Sound keep the pocket going.
Sauveur Mallia - Spatial & Co Vol. 1 Vinyl LP
Cosmic disco from the Tele Music vaults. Sauveur Mallia was the bass player's bass player of the French scene, anchoring the studio outfits Arpadys and Voyage, and on Spatial & Co he aimed his synthesizers at the stars: space-age basslines, vocoders, and orchestral disco cut for a library that had no idea it was commissioning club music. Forty years on, DJs treat these cues like lost 12" singles. Vol. 2 continues the mission, and the Space Oddities 1979-1984 collection surveys the whole flight.
Sammy Burdson & Klaus Weiss - Background Rhythms Vinyl LP
The purest expression of what a library record is: rhythm, and nothing else. This one pairs two legendary all-drums sessions from the Conroy library, Dramatic Tempi and Larry Robbins Background Rhythms, with German jazz drummer Klaus Weiss among the players, laying down break after break intended as beds for narration. Editors used them under car chases; producers use them as instant drum loops. Every collection needs one record that is nothing but pocket. Burdson's Background Action and Weiss's Open Space Motion go deeper down the same hole.
Armando Trovajoli - Chiamate 22-22 Tenente Sheridan Vinyl LP
Italy's chapter of this story runs through its film and TV studios, and Armando Trovajoli was one of its giants. This is his crime-jazz music for the early-60s RAI detective series about Lieutenant Sheridan: smoky walking basslines, noir brass, a wisp of exotica, and a theme sung by Lyda McDonald that collectors chased for decades. Four Flies assembled the complete soundtrack from the original master tapes, most of it never released in any form until now. Late-night music from a Rome that only ever existed on a soundstage, and all the better for it.
Yamasuki - Le Monde Fabuleux des Yamasuki Vinyl LP
The gloriously strange one. In 1971 French writer-producers Daniel Vangarde and Jean Kluger invented an imaginary Japan and recorded a whole album about it: fuzz bass, a children's choir, a judo master shouting instructions, and hooks that refuse to leave. It sits in this bin because it was made exactly like library music, studio pros chasing a concept with zero commercial oversight, and it has been a crate-digger handshake ever since. One more reason to care: Vangarde's son, Thomas Bangalter, went on to form Daft Punk, and you can hear the family resemblance.
DJ Muggs - Silver Cloud (Madlib Invazion Music Library Series) Vinyl LP
The tradition, alive and well. Madlib, hip-hop's most devoted library-music scholar, launched a series on his own label inviting producers to make the records they always wished they could sample, and Cypress Hill's DJ Muggs answered with Silver Cloud: haunted loops, dusty drums, and cinematic menace, a library record built by someone who spent thirty years studying them. The series runs deep in our racks; drummer Dan Ubick's Magnetic Fields and Karriem Riggins's To the Jungle are two more doors in.
Ten records from a world that was never meant to be heard outside an edit suite, and somehow ended up ahead of everything. The library music collection holds the rest of the vault, over a hundred titles deep. Come by the shop and ask to hear one; watching someone meet this music for the first time is one of the best parts of the job.
