Archive-Scavenger David Hollander

David Hollander has a head of wiry, unruly hair, thick black-rimmed glasses and a constant look of benign bemusement. When he speaks, no matter the topic, it's always with an endearing and unbridled enthusiasm?and when he speaks about one of his passions, hunting down and rereleasing lost film and tv "library music" scores, listening can be a truly beautiful thing.

Sitting in his Los Angeles studio, wearing an eloquently succinct shirt that says merely dig, the DJ, filmmaker and former child actor (in another life Hollander starred in Airplane! and had an extended run on What's Happening!) is waxing poetic on his newest project, Cinemaphonic Soul Punch.

The second release in his library music compilation partnership with Motel Records, Soul Punch is the result of Hollander's hardcore scavenging of some of the best of Britain's 70s archives. The result is a remarkable blend of late London swing and early whiteboy funk, the kind of grooves that fit just as snug on a modern hipster's hi-fi as they once did backing up a high-speed chase on The Streets of San Francisco.

Tell me why you chose a British library for this compilation.

I've gone through pretty much all of one of the most important British libraries and some of the German libraries for the next comp. The first Cinemaphonic was compiled of actually one of the few American libraries.

Why weren't there a lot of American libraries?

The total specifics I don't entirely know?it's definitely a labor union scene. Basically it came down to the bottom line, getting this premade music that was made almost entirely by Europeans who weren't in the union. It was cheaper, basically, to get this music from Europe. You got to remember my interest in this comes from growing up on tv and actually being in a lot of these types of shows that incorporated crime jazz, and those shows, when they were using actual composers, used the best... Shows like Barnaby Jones or Streets of San Francisco actually had people like Esquival, Lalo Shifrin, Quincy Jones making weekly music. You got these very experimental jazz styles, interdisciplinary, pan-generic styles. It would have to be funky, but have flutes, something "funky but feminine."

They weren't writing specifically to an image or a plotline?

No, for library music they'd say, "All right, we want technology themes or broad expansive industrial sounds, we want stuff for a science documentary." Or, "We want something for a feminine product," and it would maybe be a bossa scat vocal with a little guitar. It's interesting to hear how, given those guidelines, how different cultures interpreted it. I'm trying to choose on national themes. The Italians, you can hear it immediately, the Germans and the French are the same way?you can tell you're in their particular brand of library music. The Brits tend to be broader, they seem to be the best at imitating or adapting, but again, there is something unmistakably British about a lot of these things.

How are you deciding which time period you cover on these albums?

I've been mostly been focusing on the time period of my childhood, the period for a lot of this funky jazz, this moment in jazz and jazz rock that is interesting to my ear. But in fact a lot of that is market-driven, too. A lot of what I want to put out in library music, let's say, not everyone's ready for. There's some really out-there stuff. I want to be able to express some sense of the wholeness, span the art of library music. I mean, library music still exists. You can go and get jungle music or whatever, but those tend to be cut-rate. The library people themselves have yet to figure out that the old stuff actually works right now. Because a lot of the stuff that I'm compiling is dead parts of the library, even if the company is still in business.

Why do you think the quality depreciated so much?

There is a point where the sound kind of falls off. A lot of that has to do with the bottom line. I would mark the beginning of the end of library music as the advent of the synth. The reason why you find so much library music that is electronic is because it became really easy to stick someone in a room with an analog synth and a drum kit and say, "Come out with a record in three hours." When those tools began to come out, like in the early 80s, what might have been two or three musicians became one musician. They were sticking to the bottom line. Whereas in the moment, like this is maybe 1978 [Hollander runs to his turntable and puts on a jam of warm, deep funk grooves], you could go to these guys and you could get a full band for the price you would get for someone to do it alone with their MIDI now. This is a Polish studio band! They could get the studio and the labor cheap, then they would buy the songs.

Is this recorded live?

A lot of this is straight impromptu. They would find a groove and map it out. It was not tracked out typically. This will be on the next volume. Here's some German stuff. This stuff kills me. [Hollander puts on an even more soulful track.]

Who'da thunk the Germans could be so funky?

I know. Listen to it start to get into this triphop thing here. You hear that? This is the Gary Pacific Orchestra. There are some really great made-up names.

What makes you so passionate about this stuff?

We're at a moment right now in terms of the music world where it's really important to access what's been done before. And so much can't be accessed. A lot of it has yet to be digitized and you never know where you'll find it, and I'm always constantly surprised at the quality of the material that is there when you find it. You'll find out-there electronica, way fucking out-there, to 20th-century-style composition. There's a lot of really good new-age music, which I kind of like. There's some great rock. There are very few vocal library records but you can find them, and when you do they're amazing. I think it's important to talk about. In the age of sampling, people are starting to understand that music functions as a narrative. This music is fascinating in that it had to tell a story, without having the story in front of you. It has to be modular, but it has to have the conventions of a given moment in narrative.

Do you think our response, that interpretation of music, is based on years of syndicated Kojak or on something more instinctual?

I actually think that there's some relationship more intuitive or more direct in terms of the experience, in terms of going to your collection of sounds and your references to those sounds which you've built up. Like I said, there are certain moments where you simply connect in some innate way, you click on a very specific meaning. I don't think we're trying to read through some dense implosion of reference there. I think we're really more just talking about something innate.

Well, we've been translating music into emotional narrative long before there were moving images anyway.

Exactly. You can listen to The Rite of Spring and totally know it's about spring, just because of certain progressions and certain tones. That's a really interesting thing to see, to see the relationship between narrative and music. I think that this music is fascinating in that way, and it's important to advocate these sorts of exploration. I mean, ideally I think people will catch on, they'll be curious and hopefully I'll just keep putting these out and explore some other types of music. So that when I'm at new-age music for Volume 10, everyone will be feeling it, everyone will be right there with me.