Cavendish Archive: Hidden Gems of Library Music

Dennis Farnon is my favorite artist from our 60s and 70s catalog. His stuff is the paragon of that mysterious big band sound you get in British Library music from that era. “South Bound” is an amazing track on its own and has also been sampled by a number of artists, including on Mark B & Blade’s “The Unknown,” one of the albums that got me into hip-hop. “Snowmobile” is probably my favorite, though. I’d love to hear Ghostface Killah rap on it one day!

Another composer Ray Davies was still writing for us up until 2009 and still coming into our office until he died a couple of years ago... It was incredible to work with someone who was part of those golden years of library music. “Espresso Bongo” is probably my favorite of all his tracks on Tracklib.

We are still creating hundreds of great new tracks every year! With the 60s and 70s stuff, it has such a distinctive sound to it, in terms of both style and production. Library music was written to evoke particular moods, so we continue to have this emotional response to it. And it’s relevant because of the nostalgic response we have, due to it being so closely tied to classic television programs that we grew up with.

The amazing thing about the Samplethon project was that I only knew a small part of our archive catalogue before that. WhoSampled assembled a great team of sample-savvy producers and we spent a whole day scouring our old basement for sample gold.

There are a lot of great loopable extracts on the catalog. But my favorite thing is always hearing a really creative flip. The way a producer samples a track demonstrates how he hears it. So it’s always interesting to see how people hear the catalog in comparison to the way that I do.

I think a big part of the allure of library records is that they weren’t distributed commercially or in big numbers, so it made the music much harder to find. Most libraries, Cavendish included, used almost identical sleeves for all their albums, so you had to be a killer digger to find the best material.

The music is often a lot darker and moodier than commercial music from the time, which makes it quite suited to counterculture music like hip-hop. It was also written to sound distinctive while allowing space for voiceover – which makes it ideal for making music to rap over! In the 60s and 70s, the libraries were very open to experimentation, and so you get some really cool stuff that might have never made it onto vinyl.

When you look at the legal difficulties that sampling artists have had, and the catalogs which never got paid for their content being sampled, Tracklib is such a great way to bring those two parties together in a way that everybody wins. Plus I think that as the tracks are more accessible, it encourages people to be more creative with their sampling, which can only push music forward!

As a producer, I prefer to go with tracks I don’t know so well. So I’d love to do an epic trap remix of “Agitato Riots Etc.” It’s quite fun to see how over the top you can go sometimes.