A Year of Music

While nursing my newborn obsession with all things Mordant Music, I appear to have found a whole new rabbit hole to fall down.

When I was poking around Boomkat looking at Mordant Music’s releases, this little bit of the Carrion Squared listing jumped out at me:

Apparently made up of offcuts from a Boosey & Hawkes library music album which the duo of Baron Mordant and Admiral Greyscale were commissioned to produce, Carrion Squared is the perfect record for followers of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop desperate for a fix.

I know a little bit about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Delia Derbyshire, White Noise, the Dr. Who theme song, the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, etc), but what’s this “Boosey & Hawkes”? What’s “library music”?

It turns out that knowing a little about stock photography and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is extremely helpful when wrapping one’s head around the wide world of production music. Most photographers and designers know about royalty-free creative asset companies like Corbis, Getty Images and (on the hipsterish end) Veer. You want a stock photo of, say, a generically beautiful vaguely ethnic professional woman staring off into space while holding chic glasses in one hand in front of a blurry sunlit background, you go plug keywords into a search engine, add two or three images to your shopping cart, and buy a license to use them in your annual report or douche ad and you’re good to go. I have more than a couple friends who have sold pictures to stock photography agencies. It’s decent money if you have a knack for thinking like a corporate art director.

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was the department responsible for music and sound effects for use in the BBC’s shows, and the reason so much of the stuff that came out of the BBC in the 60s and 70s sounded so futuristic and awesome is entirely due to their crazed improvisers, who were capable of extremely creative work on a tiny budget. Douglas Adams is funny and all, but without the Radiophonic Workshop (and, oddly enough, the Eagles, whose “Journey of the Sorceror” was the Hitchhiker’s Guide theme song) there wouldn’t have been a show.

Boosey & Hawkes is a company that allows production agencies that don’t have the BBC’s license fees to outsource their production music needs. They license music and musical cues to production houses for use in advertising and documentary work, mostly. Music libraries intend for their material to be licensed, so they make it straightforward for producers and broadcasters to work with them – instead of talking to separate publishers and labels and performance rights organizations, everybody just talks to the music library. If you’re making a David Attenborough documentary about cormorants on the Isle of Man, it’s a lot more cost-effective to license a couple discs from a music library than to send a production assistant on a wild goose chase to nail down all the rights to Coldplay’s “Clocks” or whatever.

Boosey & Hawkes own one of the largest production music libraries in the world, and my awesome discovery for the evening is that they’ve put a nice search UI on the front of it, and you can listen to pretty much their entire catalog online. The clips tend to be under two minutes and are organized by concept, description and keyword. Plug in “dark aggressive” and you get back four tracks, at least one of which is a brilliant miniature darkcore epic (Nick Tidy’s “Bad Situation”). The way everything has to be squeezed down to its essence brings back the old days of rave for me, when every song mutated every 4.7 seconds and there were more ideas per track than there are on most modern mix CDs.

In fact, most of the stuff I listened to tonight was pretty good. I’d pretty much like to have a copy of everything on Drone Continuum, which contains most of the Mordant Music tracks made for Boosey & Hawkes (one of which has the delightful title that heads this post). I’m a sucker for drone music to begin with, and the utterly synthetic short songs are tasty bits of ear candy. The combination of short tracks and analog synthesis also makes it sound startlingly like a less damaged version of Omit, and Omit is one of the most compulsively listenable purveyors of weird music out there. Which also helps explain why I respond so strongly to Mordant Music, actually, because they definitely have the Omit vibe, especially on Carrion Squared.