Monday 7 July 2008

Skip to my loop...


A couple of years ago a friend of mine studied Sound Production at a University down in Australia. During a conversation on MSN one night, I half heartedly asked if they had any 'Library' LP's, and after briefly explaining to her what they were, Sarah replied, "oh yeah, they've got hundreds". So I gave her a list of composers and a rough guide of the type of titles to look for and asked if she thought it was possible to 'borrow' any. On her return at Christmas I was more than surprised to receive a nice little stack of KPMs. And not a batch of the shitty titles either. Nope - these are some of the heavy hitters from the 1000 series.

Amongst them was 'Beat Incidental' (KPM 1043) by Keith Mansfield and Alan Hawkshaw - a killer album that includes some well known breaks and club tunes. Anyway, after briefly skimming through them all I settle down to a more in depth listen - this album being first off the pile. Side A's all good, loads of samples and above all some really great music. Side B kicks off with 'Funky Fanfare', a very well know Library cut that's been comped a few times over the years. Nice. I'm now on to track 3, 'Funky Flight', which is basically an uptempo variation of 'Funky Fanfare'. I'm working on the computer at the same time and after a while notice something a bit strange. Library cuts are normally only about 2 to 3 minutes long yet this had been playing for well over 10 minutes! I get up to inspect the grooves, and, there it is - the needle skipping on every rotation about half way through the song, creating a damn near perfect loop! Normally I'd be pissed with a skip on a record but on this occasion I found something quite satisfying about it.

Check it out...


Keith Mansfield 'Funky Flight' (1969 KPM L.P. track)



7 comments:

Chris Sobieniak said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Chris Sobieniak said...

Yeah, I see your point, still, shame if that skip happens a lot, love to get one of these LP's too (especially Beat Incidental).

MR KRUM said...

Luckily that's the only skip on there - the vinyl is near enough mint so the rest plays fine. I wasn't too bothered about that particular track anyway as it doesn't really go anywhere.

Try and track down the album though as it's definitely one of the best KPMs.

Chris Sobieniak said...

You're probably right, but I still get a kick out of it since i used to hear that one over and over through different places (found it once used on a 16mm educational film discarded from a high school I went to)!

Somehow much of Side B of this LP got used by a seedy TV distributor in the early 70's for a particular cartoon that was originally produced in black & white during the silent days of the cinema, but was not redrawn into color by some Korean outfit since American TV demanded color cartoons at that point in time. A lot of KPM tracks were used by this company for many of these silent cartoons and some actual sound ones that were stripped of their original soundtracks, but here's that cartoon in question so you can see what I'm talking about (this was from a PAL source, so naturally it sounds a tad faster than I remember it being)!

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2b95a_mutt-and-jeff-egyptian-daze_family

MR KRUM said...

Crazy!

From memory (I'll check later) it sounds like they've just stuck the record on and left it - I'm pretty sure the tracks are playing in exactly the same sequence as they are on the album!

Thanks for sharing that...

Divine! said...

My copy of Beat Incidental skips exactly the same as yours. And managed to find another, same again. So, pretty sure it's a pressing fault they all have...

Chris Sobieniak said...

That's pretty crazy.