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LP
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JBH 105LP
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Two sublime unreleased scores from Basil Kirchin. The next Trunk/Kirchin assignment. Basically some more unreleased music from the unpredictable and slightly chaotic Kirchin Tape Archive. These tapes were labelled up as follows: Assignment K (with lots of pencil scribbles everywhere); The Strange Affair (with lots of pen scribbles everywhere). As usual with Basil tapes/things there is little else to go on, no tracklist, no list of musicians, no singer names, no dates or anything. Assignment K dates from 1968, and was a film about a toy maker who has a double life as an international spy. It was directed by Val Guest, who'd just finished trying to rescue the cinematic hotchpotch that was Casino Royale -- he had been brought in by the Bond producers after Peter Sellers had walked off the movie. As for the Kirchin score here, there is very little information, apart from the fact that the bass player was Ron Prentice (an ex blacksmith turned musician and craftsman) who worked on several Bond scores. The Strange Affair is also from 1968, and was not only controversial but also a reasonably unsuccessful movie. Directed by David Greene who also directed, amongst other films, I Start Counting and the brilliant Sebastian. In this rather grubby flick a policeman called Peter Strange (played by Michael York) falls for an underage girl (played by Susan George), finds himself compromised by a pair of pornographers and gets lured into an errand for a smack gang. This music has all the classic Kirchin mid-period sonic hallmarks that have always set him apart.
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LP
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JBH 085LP
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Three unheard 1960s and 1970s reels from the unreal and unreleased Basil Kirchin Tape Archive. Sublime pastoral jazz, autistic children screaming, spooky vocals, experimental tape manipulation, and much more from the master of such things. The three parts of this new Basil Kirchin album come from three very different tapes from his archive. All parts were unreleased until now. "Pat's Pigs" actually sounds like a Basil bird recording, slowed and treated, mixed with simple improvisation. But it could well be pigs. Pat's pigs. This whole tape recording may have been an early experiment towards what was to become Kirchin's Worlds Within Worlds Parts I and II (JBH 080LP). A lot of Basil's work was headed in that direction. "Electronic" is not that electronic. There are elements of the classic Basil Kirchin drone sound here, mixed with multiple and treated recordings of the autistic children of Schurmatt, along with Esther, his wife, singing. Esther worked as a nurse with the children, Basil got to know many of them, and became fascinated by the extreme musical noises they would make with their voices. This recording is not necessarily for the faint hearted, but makes for extraordinary listening, based on the fact this would have been made and mixed, simply as a classic and progressive Kirchin experiment, back in the late 1960s/early 1970s. This also has untreated elements that would eventually contribute towards Quantum, his preferred version of the WWW concept. "The Suspended Fourth" comes across like a soundtrack. It has a very distinctive and pastoral Kirchin style leitmotif that repeats along its glorious and slightly disturbed 21 minutes. It's very well produced, possibly built up and improvised over a few days. The tape itself states that this is The Suspended Forth with a subtitle: "The Musical Study Of A Mind, Part 1 Schizophrenia". It therefore could be something to do with a soundtrack he was asked to make for a mental health conference for psychiatrists at Earls Court in the late 1960s (see States Of Mind, -- the British jazz musical line seems like it could well be the very same). The original title for this album and the artwork come from an empty tape box from the archive, which sums up all sorts of things about Basil, his music, and the tape archive all at the same time. More reel discoveries will follow. Full color sleeve with sleevenotes.
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LP
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JBH 080LP
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A few stray extra copies of this RSD 2019 release. Worlds Within Worlds: Part I And II is one of the most important experimental and improvised jazz-based recordings of all time. Released in 1971 it sold just a handful of copies, but has become a keystone in the development of ambient sounds; originals now fetch £1000+. This is the first time this exceptional, unique, and highly desirable record has been repressed. Originally conceived whilst walking round the docklands in Hull, Basil Kirchin felt that the futuristic music he had often imagined could actually be made. Only in 1969 and with the help of an arts grant could he afford the vital equipment he needed: a Nagra tape machine and Sennheiser directional microphone. Armed with these tools he set about recording landscapes, people, places, machines, animals, birds, bees, the zoo, and the autistic children from Schurmatt in Switzerland. He then took these recordings, edited them and then began the process of slowing them down to reveal the "little boulders of sound" hidden deep within the recordings. Kirchin built up layers of noise, symphonies of slowness, and then encouraged his jazz associates including Derek Bailey and Evan Parker to improvise along. The result was WWW, and nothing quite like it had been made or heard before. Today it offers listeners a mesmerizing sonic experience that remains years ahead of its time. This first ever repress features a new gatefold sleeve (Kirchin hated the original sleeve), with images of Kirchin, his original field recording tapes, and notes by WWW fan Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth). Edition of 1500 with 300 on gold vinyl; the LPs will be mixed randomly -- there will be no way of telling which color is which as all LPs will be sealed. Personnel: Basil Kirchin, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Claire Deniz, Graham Lyons, Daryl Runswick, Frank Ricotti. The perfect RSD release.
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LP
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JBH 068LP
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Sublime unreleased score for the weird cult/brutalist thriller I Start Counting! (1970). Charming, odd, and affecting score by Basil Kirchin, made "in association" with his regular cohorts, Jack Nathan and John A. Coleman. The film was directed by the multi-talented and quite radical David Greene. Greene was also an actor, a successful producer and had already employed the services of Kirchin for his 1967 horror The Shuttered Room and quirky crime thriller The Strange Affair (1968). I Start Counting!, notably starred a 14-year-old Jenny Agutter, is set in brutalist Bracknell, with Agutter's character living in Royal Point, a classic "threepenny bit" of a 1960s tower block. When she ventures away from the safety of this concrete castle on an obsessive, erotically charged journey, her world is turned upside down. As macabre, coming-of-age thriller, the score for I Start Counting! allowed Kirchin to explore more dark edges of film music and composition: as a score, it bubbles along with lots of classic Kirchin hallmarks, but here you are also treated to a beguiling opening song that is lyrically and musically developed and then slowly pulled apart over sequential cues. There is also an unusual Eastern tinge to some of the percussion and Kirchin's distinctive pastoral oddness is here too. His sonic jumps between low drama and high tension are extraordinary, and his use of free jazz to bring about unease is both perfectly simple and effective. Basil's original idea for the opening song was to have it sung by Cilla Black or Jenny Agutter, but in the end Lindsay Moore, the daughter of jazz chum Barbara Moore stepped in. The score is mighty fine but a little short, so included here is more unreleased soundtrack material from the Kirchin archive -- a tape labeled "Third World Documentary". This dates from the early 1980s and was produced for either TV or a festival and musically complements the first score well, even though they are two decades apart. The names of the musicians working here died with Basil, but the drummer for I Start Counting! may well have been Clem Cattini, Evan Parker was more than likely involved with the session, and possibly Derek Bailey too. As for the later recording, there is a distinctive modern "Fairview" sound to the cues and production. Mastered and sequenced by Jon Brooks, AKA The Advisory Circle.
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LP
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SV 126LP
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"Basil Kirchin was a pioneering British composer who blurred the lines between musical genres. While his career began in the '40s as a professional jazz drummer, in the '60s he started to make field-recordings, painstakingly splicing tapes and slowing-down sounds until the source material would be virtually unrecognizable. Originally released on Island Records in 1974, Worlds Within Worlds juxtaposes Kirchin's various tape manipulations - -amplified insects, animals, engines, glossolalia of children -- with traditional musical instruments to form an organic totality that has the overall effect of otherworldly, ambient soundscapes. As Brian Eno writes in the liner notes on the original release, 'Within the first couple of minutes it became obvious to me that Basil had not only discovered a whole new area of sound, but had exploited it with extreme skill and sensitivity, producing beautiful and evocative music as well. . . . So Basil Kirchin has made a double contribution: he has not only built the instrument, but has written and played the first successful works for it.' Worlds Within Worlds remains a lost classic in sonic abstraction. This first-time reissue is recommended for fans of Broadcast, Aphex Twin and Nurse With Wound."
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LP
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JBH 067LP
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An awe-inspiring sampler of the late, great musical polymath's music. From pop punk pop to field recordings, jazz, horror film music, ambient sounds, experimental ideas and all points in between. Many tracks have not been released before. Basil Kirchin was a unique talent. A man brought up as a drummer in the post-war big band era, he soon shunned the sounds of London ballrooms for world travel, marijuana, and spiritual enlightenment. On his return to London in the mid-1960s, he started work on experimental "sound picture music", a direction that led him into horror film music, library music, and eventually, to field recordings. He then developed the idea of slowing down the sounds of bird, insects, animals, autistic children -- anything he recorded in fact -- to reveal the hidden particles of sound that made them up. Mixing this with free jazz improvisation in 1969, he developed a new, peculiar sound that is now known as "ambient". Here, in this unique Trunk Record's sampler, the label offers a fascinating musical glimpse into his world, bringing together work from three decades, plus parts of a long conversation between Jonny Trunk and Basil Kirchin, recorded a few months before Kirchin died. There is unreleased film music, field recordings including autistic children from Schurmatt, music for advertising, the opening of Quantum (JBH 003CD), brilliant mixes of jazz and birds ("Charcoal Sketches"), the newly discovered digital post punk classic "Silicon Chip", plus brilliant and moving homages to his life with Esther, his wife. Together it makes extraordinary listening. All cues mastered and sequenced by Jon Brooks, AKA The Advisory Circle.
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7"
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TTT 010EP
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An unreleased 1979 post-punk-post-disco banger from British musical maverick, Basil Kirchin. Back in the late 1970s, Kirchin was in Hull, working on numerous projects, documentary scores, and strange musical concepts. "Silicon Chip" is a rare surviving and most unusual work from the period, until now an unreleased slice of jumping, plugged-in perfection presciently celebrating the dawn of the computer-based industrial revolution. "Silicon Chips" is a set of quick electro blasts and logos, possibly conceived and written for library usage. Personnel: Gary Burroughs - vocals, guitar, keyboards; Danny Wood - drums; Dane Morrell - drums; Bernie Dolman - bass.
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CD
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JBH 038CD
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This is the first-ever release of not ONE but TWO classic Basil Kirchin soundtracks, one from 1965, the other 1971. It's music for strippers, wife-swapping, death, birth, crime and chicken factories. Basil Kirchin is a legendary jazz drummer and grandfather of ambient music. He started his jazz career drumming in his father's jazz band. In the war years, he took over the band and post-war travelled to the East, hung out with the Maharishi, found himself, moved to Australia and finally returned home to the UK in the early 1960s with jazz ideas the likes of which no one else had ever dreamt. He moved into film music composition, library music and special commissions. By the late 1960s, he was experimenting with free jazz, tape manipulations and animal recordings. His series of works entitled Worlds Within Worlds are the first examples of ambient music. Regarded as a musical genius by many of the world's current music geniuses, Basil Kirchin's influence and following grows and grows each day. No one knows how and why drummer and jazzman Basil Kirchin came to write his first-ever soundtrack, but the sounds he created for Primitive London and its images of abattoirs, strip joints, alcoholism, beatniks and peculiar supermarkets are second-to-none. The music is film music but with touches of jazz, drones and oddness, impressive for such an early recording. There's even a tune surprisingly similar to Herrmann's Taxi Driver, a score written over a decade later. Primitive London is notorious as the UK's first and most important "Mondo" movie. The images filmed were strange, sensational, shocking and sleazy, the music harrowing, groovy and hip. This short, and until now unreleased score is accompanied on this release by a soundtrack Kirchin wrote six years later, for a very different kind of London film. Called The Freelance, this rough, tough crime flick is rarely seen, but features lively performances by classic British character actors and a young, impressive Ian McShane. Set in the criminal underworld, Kirchin brought to the screen the sounds of progressive drumming, free jazz and a touch of new decade optimism. The cues are long, develop well and are like no other. Both scores represent important times in Kirchin's musical life; the first score pre-dates his library work, the second comes at a time when this master of modern jazz music and industrial sounds had reached a creative peak. Both scores are unmistakably Kirchin, with his instant, insistent rhythms, memorable melodies and distinctive, strange jazz sounds permeating this entire release. His ever-growing band of fans will love it all. Superb full-color sleeve taken from the original 1965 Primitive London press book. CD comes with a 12-page color booklet with a history of the film, original rare film stills as well as notes by Jonny Trunk and the BFI.
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CD
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JBH 021CD
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For the last five years Trunk Records have been issuing the great, lost work of pioneering British composer Basil Kirchin. Here is his last album, completed only a couple of weeks before he passed away in late 2005. It proves that Kirchin, even in his mid-'70s, was still very much an experimentalist at the top of his odd game. Kirchin invented ambient music and set the template to which much of today's avant garde music sounds like. Highlights of Particles are many -- "The Atonals" for example, was made using conversations between musicians that Basil had secretly recorded over the years. These conversations were then processed into music and the results are quite startling. In fact, the whole album is brimming and bursting with odd ideas, new ways and the unique Kirchin sound. The current Trunk favorite is the last, epic ten-minute hypnotic monster simply called "E+Me." It's an obvious homage to his dear wife Esther, who actually sings at the end of this heavily rhythmic, modal tune. Tragically, Esther died a week before this last Kirchin CD was pressed. Particles adds further fuel to the glowing Kirchin legend, and increases his standing up there with all the other groovy weirdos of the world.
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CD
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JBH 003CD
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First issue of this archival recording, originally recorded in 1973. "This is not a reissue. This is the first Basil Kirchin recording released for thirty years. Format: CD and very limited vinyl (500 numbered copies) release. Although there hasn't been a Basil Kirchin release for over 30 years, his reputation is still intact as being one of the most innovative and influential composers of the late 20th Century. This release is possibly his finest hour. It's certainly his weirdest. His last releases, in 1971 and 1973 are both rare and highly influential. This is the man who discovered a new way of listening and a whole new sound --with his unique mixture of jazz and field recordings he became a key influence in the development of Brian Eno's famous ambient works, and also a major influence behind the industrial movement of the mid seventies, for bands like Nurse With Wound. However his influence does not stop in the seventies -- bands such as Broadcast are now citing Kirchin as an influence. Constructed in the early 70s, Quantum was spliced together by Basil using jazz, field recordings (animals, insects. trains), his wife and autistic children. Artists involved include the hugely important Evan Parker, Darryl Runswick, Kenny Wheeler and Graham Lyons. The result is a very different and occasionally harrowing journey through sound. Beautiful and often extraordinarily dark, imagine an early 1970s version of the Aphex Twin mixed with a bit of Bjork."
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