Nuggets: Luke Vibert’s Selection

Most library music compilations seem content to promote a simple cross-section — a particular label, a certain sound — that aims for a sort of reivisionist-historical consistency with as few idiosyncratic human fingerprints as possible, the music speaking for itself and nobody else. UK producer Luke Vibert, whose songs typically aim for a kind of absurd cartoon beauty whether they’re danceable or downtempo, went “nah” to propriety when it came time to put his own comp together. Nuggets compiles some of the most oddball cuts from the ranks of labels like Chappell, Southern, L’Illustration Musicale and others, with a heavy emphasis on the more eccentric, synth-experimental and exotica-leaning cuts from French composers like Nino Nardini, Roger Roger, and Eddie Warner. In the process it draws a line, however Spirograph-squiggly, from these ’60s and ’70s curiosities to millennium-changeover IDM — or at least its weirder tendencies.