Marcus Fjellström :: Library Music 1 (Kafkagarden)

A Greig-like overture glittering with Nordic morning dew, machine music for workers in the player-piano factory, three-ring ditties for a merry-go-round made of fog, synthesizer noir, avantgarde duets for prepared piano and singing saw and one hundred and one strings for snowglobe fantasias.

“Library music” is the generic term for music rented by the yard; it is the musical equivalent of stock footage, created to help budget productions establish scenes or moods at cut-rate cost. In popular culture, it has the greatest impact and even acquired a certain hip factor via the TV comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm. Brian Eno may have been the first contemporary avant artist to take its parameters seriously with his Music for Films, which turned out to be a great success, as decades later, you can still hear these pieces playing in the background of television shows and documentaries.

Unlike other kinds of canned music like Muzak, constructed in accordance with strict industry standards for maximal utilitarian effect, the composer of library music doesn´t really know where his music will end up or exactly what mood or reaction it will be used to evoke.

Swedish composer Marcus Fjellström (Gebrauchsmusik, Schattenspieler) borrows this conceit and ends up somewhere in the middle. His library music is not unobtrusive as is Muzak´s subliminal intent, nor is it as otherworldly as Eno’s. Each brief track has an approachable, earth-bound deportment of its own. Many of the code-numbered tracks (“LM-101,” “LM-102,” “LM-111” and so forth) are lighthearted and animated, others more pensive and textural. A Greig-like overture glittering with Nordic morning dew, machine music for workers in the player-piano factory, three-ring ditties for a merry-go-round made of fog, synthesizer noir, avantgarde duets for prepared piano and singing saw and one hundred and one strings for snowglobe fantasias. Fjellström’s miniatures offer you options but not a blank slate. They are too well-crafted not to draw attention to themselves.

Library Music 1 is available on Kafkagarden.