A connection to time and space

Pierpaolo De Sanctis is interviewed at Dust & Grooves—the Rome, Italy-based label owner and lifelong record hound runs Four Flies Records, which is home to some of today’s finest “lost soundtrack” reissues and archival Italian library music projects. In his conversations with writers Tee Cardaci and Fiona MacPherson-Amador, which are excerpted in the new Dust & Grooves book, De Sanctis distinguishes between the two genres:

The soundtrack includes the music composed for a certain film, music that the composer realized and recorded whilst realizing or watching a certain sequence. Library music is a piece of music that is composed and recorded for something that does not yet exist and can be used for any purpose. It is more like a concept album that centers around a theme, like underwater or space ambients. Each album of library music is strongly themed and characterized by an identity.

In terms of collecting, these two worlds are really close to each other because all of these records were out of commerce or printed in a very small run. The only way to receive them was to be a journalist or to work at a TV or radio station as a programmer or music consultant. They got this music because it was part of their work. It had nothing to do with collecting or a passion for music. They issued 200 to 300 copies of the records to ensure that music was synced to the screen to receive money from the broadcasters. 

Music for a film, radio production, or TV show “that does not yet exist” is the key when it comes to distinguishing library music from a soundtrack.

During the 1960s and ‘70s, “a golden age of television and genre filmmaking” meant that there was “a need for more and more soundtrack music,” wrote library music historian David Hollander in his Unusual Sounds: The Hidden History of Library Music, a heavily researched book on library music that, with its hundreds of carefully reproduced album covers, is an art book as much as it is a reference.

The music created at studio sessions that were scheduled by music libraries was done so on the cheap—the musicians were “for hire,” and the licensing was simplified as the library music company acted as an administrator. These recordings were intended to be sold or loaned directly to producers working on a project for broadcast. Library albums weren’t for consumers, and they didn’t find their way into record stores.

Hollander explains:

“After the (library) LPs had outlived their usefulness, they were either thrown out or sent back to the library, relegated to becoming obsolete objects that would sit, neglected, in company archives for years until they were ultimately disposed of—or rescued by a collector.”

For record collectors of a certain tax bracket, acquiring original Italian library records—or most original library music—is certainly possible. But for us normies? No chance. There was a time when the gettin’ was good, but the most sought-after library grails are mythically rare. De Sanctis “pray(s) for luck every day,” because when these records end up on the walls of shops or online, it’s empty-your-savings-account or nothing.

“There was no interest in this stuff when I started,” Lorenzo Fabrizi of Sonor Music Editions, another Rome-based label that specializes in archival film and library music, told the New York Times in 2021. There’s definitely interest now.

An original copy of Piero Umiliani’s impossibly diverse To-Day’s Sound, which features short bursts of everything from organ jazz to country to jittery, spaced-out funk, for example, fetched more than three thousand dollars at online marketplace Discogs from a buyer of means in 2023, and similarly ludicrous dollar amounts can be found on the platform for Spontaneous, a collection of library music created by Alessandro Alessandroni—a collaborator of Ennio Morricone’s—in 1974.

Spontaneous was initially part of RCA Italy’s 10000-series, which was also home to Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai's highly regarded Dimensioni Sonore: Musiche Per L'Immagine E L'Immaginazione series. Also broad-ranging in its scope, Alessandroni’s LP was reissued by De Sanctis’s Four Flies in 2019, and there are more records on the way—the label’s founder hasn’t tired of rescuing dusty tape reels from obscurity.

”I’m excited when I put my hands on a lost master tape for the first time because I feel a connection to time and space,” De Sanctis tells Dust & Grooves. “It’s like a time machine. It’s a magic moment for me, a revelation, when music from a film I have long searched for finally comes in front of me. I am a music enthusiast. I am a cinema enthusiast. I jump in the air when I find something that has been considered to be lost forever.”

Image of Pierpaolo De Sanctis © Copyright 2008-2025 Dust & Grooves Editions