7. Barry 7’s Connectors 2
I think it was much to Barry’s dismay that Giuseppe De Luca’s ‘Rito A Los Angeles’ was used on the Oceans 12 soundtrack. When you compile this stuff you get to bring it to people but what people do with it afterwards is kind of out of your hands, and you don’t get much thanks for it. Barry was really supportive early on in encouraging me to find as much music as I could and doing these electronic experiments. He’d been doing it for a long time already and I think he was so happy to just encourage other people, and he hooked me up with this compilation. In The Horrors, we listened to this as a group after a really long night out, and that first track is such a banger and we were like: "Wow this is fucking great!" Then it kind of slows down a little bit and there are a couple of slower, moodier tracks and I think we were all a bit fried and we were like, "Oh shit, it’s going to get really slow and boring", but then it becomes this like magical compilation that’s so well done. It’s such a journey and it’s got such an atmosphere to it. In some ways that’s how the tracks exist for me. When I find them on their original records, I’m always like, "Yeah, that’s really cool", but when they’ve been put together like this they take on a different life, like with Barry’s one it’s this weird, slightly electronic, slightly haunting sound. It had all the sounds we were into, but it was something totally new and I really like that about library music.
It’s not really made with too much of a commercial agenda. It does sort of have a commercial agenda because they’re just given a brief and they’re getting paid to make a few tracks, but they don’t have to worry about things in the same way as a commercial artist does. They can do things like, you know, "Oh we’re just going to have a bass drum loop for five minutes and nothing else is going to happen and that’ll be one track and then we’ll have another track that’s the same thing but it’s a different beat", and it sounds great, you know. They always get amazing musicians to do it. It’s weird because the extremes that they go to and experiments that they undertake on library records go beyond what most pop artists do but it’s still got this slight pop feel, it’s not as raw as crazy music made by people who don’t really know what they’re doing. It’s crazy music made by people who absolutely know what they’re doing and they get the best people in for the job, and it’s recorded beautifully. Some of the electronic experimentation that goes on is so inspiring and so mind-blowing and I guess it’s obvious that it’s made its way back into popular music through sampling cause that’s just not the stuff you hear usually.
