The Monday Long Player #14

Soulful: Instrumental Love Machine - The Night Strings

I’m just past the halfway mark in the alphabet of my record collection spring clean which is proving to be both a satisfying and illuminating experience. The goal of this little project I’ve set myself is to fully organise my records so I can actually find things I’m looking for, as well as culling a few of the less-listened LPs that are lurking in the racks. The ‘M’ section was a bit of a behemoth (all those Madlib, Mayfield, Mingus and Mulatu records take up a fair bit of space), whereas ’N’ was quite slim in comparison. I was pretty familiar with most of the LPs in the section - favourites from Milton Nascimento, Nas and Nightmares On Wax and a nice stack of Nucleus albums.

There was one that didn’t ring any bells with me - Soulful: Instrumental Love Machine by The Night Strings. A look at the cover led me to assume (correctly) that it was an easy listening record, and the tracklist confirmed it; covers of popular, contemporary (for 1969) tunes given a string-laden orchestral treatment. My guess was that I must have picked it up when I held ambitions to make music; I’ve twice bought an MPC only for it to sit un-used before eventually being sold on. I also have a vague memory that this was gifted to me by my friend Mr Thing but I’m not 100% sure.

Sticking it on while sorting my NxWorries from my NuYorican Soul LPs, I had that wonderful experience that nerdy sample geeks of my vintage live for. As the second track Black Sand and White Stars started up I instantly recognised the hook - from an artist nestled right next to the Night Strings on the shelf. No sample snitching here, although it is on WhoSampled if you’re interested. The feeling of recognising a sample is just the best. A mixture of exhilaration, fascination, smugness and vindication at the hours you’ve spent absorbed in music rather than doing something more sociable. I’d imagine that I’d have had this feeling the first time I listened to the record after acquiring it, so to have a double hit was a cherished rarity.

There’s not much information available online about The Night Strings, but featured artist Homer Dennison went on to have a career in orchestration, notably working on Howard Shore’s soundtrack for The Silence Of The Lambs. The record itself is a lot fun - lush Henry Mancini-esque jazzy cuts that you can imagine soundtracking a 60s Hollywood movie set on the French Riviera. One online description of the album labelled it a ‘make-out record’ which made me laugh but does kind of make sense. This description became much more compelling when reading the liner notes.

“Soulful”…”Voluptuous”…”Passionate”…”Hot”…”Cool”

• It vibrates with the feel of today’s songs…today’s musical excitement

• It rocks to the right beat

• It cries out in soulful warmth…and sexy splendour.

• It’s hot…and it’s cool…because today, that’s where it’s at!

50 plus years on, this kind of groovy, innuendo-filled write-up seems like it’s lifted straight out of an Austin Powers reboot, but it does make it clear what the selling point of the record was: put this on and you’re going to have sex today. The soft-focus cover completes the picture and one can imagine nervous young men in flowery shirts and flares picking this up on a Saturday afternoon in the vain hope that it will miraculously turn them into Paul Newman.

Stepping back a little it reminded me that the more things change, the more they stay the same. A common complaint amongst musician and label friends is the way in which streaming services seek to turn music into wallpaper - something that serves another activity rather than being valued in its own right. Be it cooking, studying, exercising or even sex, there’s a playlist for you with the perfect ‘content’ to meet your needs. Albums like Instrumental Love Machine were doing this half a century ago, and whilst today we have soundalikes populating playlists, back then it was cover versions - albeit showing much greater artistry than the AI Slop that is overtaking the algorithm in 2026.

I guess the logical thing to do is create a playlist called Instrumental Love Machine…although Homer Dennison’s arrangements won’t be represented as they only exist on vinyl, their use no longer soundtracking late 60s romantic evenings, but instead serving producers wanting to chop, sample and flip decades old tracks into something new and vital. It feels right that music created for a specific purpose is still used for something beyond the music itself - a rare instance of music being used as a tool actually being in the spirit of the artist’s intention, albeit in ways they couldn’t imagine.

In case you were wondering, this record escaped the cull. The music itself is way better than it needs to be, and maybe one day I will actually make some music and return to this record for some “passionate’ sounds to sample. It’s also a great reminder of how music evolves over time, how the forgotten can become revered and how the ‘new’ has rarely not been done before.

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The Monday Long Player is a weekly newsletter from me, Aly Gillani aka Gilla. I’m a radio host, DJ, A&R and writer. I run First Word Records and am the Artist and Label Outreach Lead at Bandcamp. You can listen to my latest radio show on Rinse FM just here, check out my fortnightly Bandcamp Selects show here and buy my zine The Long Player just here. Subscribe to get a weekly write up of a record I’ve been listening to this week as well as news from my musical world.