Luke Vibert

On a musical holiday to several studios outside of Paris, Luke Vibert played the role of musical archivist, trawling through hundreds of tape boxes to compile Nuggets: Luke Vibert's Selection, a collection of some of the wackiest library music of the '60s and '70s. French library music hit its artistic peak during the early '70s, when a British musician's union dispute shifted the focus of "music on any theme" across the channel. The steady French diet of electronics, musique concrète, avant-garde jazz, and yeh-yeh pop made for hundreds of alternately groovy, experimental, or funky recordings, released in limited editions of 200 to 500 and promptly forgotten. Nuggets, basically the work of three composers -- Roger Roger, Nino Nardini, and Eddie Warner -- includes nearly 30 tracks, most one- or two-minute snippets of crazed theme music, many of them sounding far more intrusive than background music should. It's difficult to imagine the phased-out-of-its-mind "Electronic Track 10" playing underneath a radio advertisement, though an earnestly groovy electro-popcorn number like "Electrostalactites" may have fared better. Not quite revelatory, but certainly interesting for fans of proto-electronica who can't get enough Bruce Haack, Perrey-Kingsley, early Add N (To X), or the Incredibly Strange Music compilations. ~ John Bush, Rovi