What this compilation does is show just how inventive and off-the-cuff incidental music used to be before execs started nabbing standard chart sounds (or similar) to fill out their programmes.
What this compilation does is show just how inventive and off-the-cuff incidental music used to be before execs started nabbing standard chart sounds (or similar) to fill out their programmes.
Studio G – G-Spots
http://www.trunkrecords.com/ http://www.konkurrent.nl/
Ah the title pun’s killing me. Luckily the line directly underneath captures this reviewer’s attention; the “spacey folk electro-horror sounds of the Studio G library”. Mein Gott, if that doesn’t have you getting out the sherry in celebration, what will?
But, don’t be fooled.
It’s not all weird and wibbly Delia Derbyshire stuff though, despite F Afzelius’s magnificent Utopean synth burn up with Cosmic Blues, or Eric Peters’ Deformed Theme. Studio G was a London label concerned with creating incidental and theme music for TV and there are many semi-detached, mild mannered moments – putting one in mind of going round to your auntie Marion’s to watch Ski Sunday in Bury around 1976, yes, Douglas Wood, that’s what your stuff, particularly Soul Riff, Icicles or Kids Stuff does to me. And of course the Vision On themes instantly transport this child of the 70’s back to a time of uncomfortable sweaters…
At times things go into Gong territory (James Harpham’s 2004AD) or out Eno-ing Eno, (P Willsher / T Kelly’s Foggy Dock or James Asher’s Cosmic Dust. Or, for that matter, Frederick Judd’s sonic wibbles in Sprockets). Elsewhere things get freaked out big time. James Harpham’s Voodoo Tronics is a magnificent example of the kind of bonkers musical collisions that happened in the early seventies. We were all going to the future, and we needed a new soundtrack for a new kind of living. Or so our lords and masters said…
What this compilation does is show just how inventive and off-the-cuff incidental music used to be before execs started nabbing standard chart sounds (or similar) to fill out their programmes. You’d have thought, what with the rise of electronica over the last 10 years or so that someone would have tried to lift the bar again. As it is, this record shows what you can achieve if you mix entertainment with a little imagination and a bit of forward thinking.