moodsetters

The keen eyed among you might well recall us mentioning this ever so briefly a week or two ago, one of several library / lounge releases currently touting for your listening ear – if not see here https://marklosingtoday.wordpress.com/2018/09/28/moodsetters/ . This one from the ever eclectic Buried Treasure stable, aptly titled ‘moodsetters’ is a positive shelf of the weird, the wonky and the wicked all drawn from Sys Dale archive and gathering together of talents between commissions eking out soundscapes for the use of TV and film. The set is oozed in nostalgic eccentricity, at times kitsch-y and others ridiculously groovy, these cuts veer in degrees between jazz mosaics, electronic noodles (see Albert Alan Owen’s teasingly brief ‘bleeps and impulses’ all straight out of a 50’s sci-fi flick and very much inspired by the Barrons methinks) and coolly cut spy noir grooves (as on the exotic opener ‘tribal warfare’ by Jim Lawless which comes smoked with marimbas and some dead eyed cool fuzzy riffage, his ‘news travels fast’ is also worth a peak especially if you adore all those early 70’s cop noir schedules). Talking of spy noire, some tasty bargain Bond’s afoot amid Vic Flick’s ‘Marlowe PI’. Of the picks mooching amid the grooves, Paddy Kingsland and Monica Beale, both mentioned in our previous briefing deserve listens on first encounter, the Beale track ‘interface’ is, in our humbled opinion, a mind blowing eye opener. Then there’s Alan Parker’s ‘border incident’ just pure schmooze and lights lowered jazz sultriness kissed with a lights out after dark mid 80’s toning while Frank Ricotti’s ‘hostile moods’ loosely turns around a palette fused with Schifrin and Budd shadings. Mr Ricotti pops up again later on with ‘rhythm riot’ to lay down some nifty funk struck ju-ju while his ‘lonely streets’ is perhaps only upended in terms of cool seduction by our next selection. One of the leading lights of these library platters and a name you’ll oft find alongside those of Messrs. Hawkshaw and Bennett is Keith Mansfield, whose adept craft of seductive scene setting mood making sounds is exemplary in this field, here cooks up a friends around for cheese and wine evening sophisticat ‘thunderfoot’ while the suavely kitsch late club land swoons and smokes when Syd Dale’s super chilled cocktail woozy shimmers into ear shot courtesy of ‘all on a summer’s day’. Elsewhere, Art of Noise-r Anne Dudley sneaks in with a brace of electronic curios in the shape of ‘bubblegum’ and ‘computer pop’, these old school analogue etchings swirls with an airless futuristic gaze, the former a delightfully gloopy star orbital at play in the cosmic clouds dusted in a classical phrasing while the latter, ‘funky town’ motifs aside, passes for a silent solar drifter built upon a spared kosmische tethering. As said in a previous posting, these would be soundtracks often came with the most obvious of titles, basically summing up in a nutshell what was inside without the need to play a single note. Step up for prime example purposes Harpsichord Rhythm Group with two such cuties – ‘troubadour song’ and ‘the new Elizabethans’ – the former a waltzing slice of disarming bucolic idyll the latter dressed daintily in the fineries of a regality courtship trimmed off with flighty floral follies. Resistance is useless. https://buriedtreasure.bandcamp.com/album/moodsetters