Daniel O'Sullivan

Last year, English musician Daniel O'Sullivan released the first of his trilogy of library albums recorded for the KPM Music Library.  The second of those LP's, "Fourth Density," came out yesterday, and it's a gorgeous and meditative thing.  O'Sullivan pulls from drone, new age, planetarium soundtracks, and maybe even a little bit of Popol Vuh-inspired prog to craft a quasi-score for quiet space travel or an imaginary nature documentary.  I'm years out of school, but this would have been amazing stuff to study to.

Here's what O'Sullivan himself had to say about the project:

Library music. Akasha. Here you accept that music behaves like a thing to accentuate another thing, seemingly unrelated. A beautiful, shining blankness. Not passive. An opportunity to wade. A brief encounter with an open-ended destiny. As in, you never know who or what it will be partnered with. With library music the emphasis tends to be on functionality and less on sonic self-portraiture. So it compels you to be concise, like what is the function of this work? The distance is liberating. It’s less “What Am I? and more “What Is This?”. It compels you to be brief, each little cell is a world of its own in an assemblage of miniatures all vibrating in their collective identity. Then there is the occult nature of library music which is fetishized by many for its ability to induce time travel, often to send us back to some televisual memory. However, despite its broad-brush strokes, the library can be so profoundly alien, especially when experienced independently of the televisual realm; an unruly chimera of genre mutations, compositional curiosities and the deepest wallpaper you ever laid ears on. Perhaps the observances of library music can help unshackle us from our artistic insecurities and delusions, where one is drawn to the shape of music as a whole instrument unto itself; as a vehicle carrying our intention and consisting of everything we have to give at that moment; so things that are seemingly unrelated are ultimately connected.

It's all definitely worth your time.  Check out the album opening "Perpetual Ascension" below and get the record here from VHF.