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basil kirchin - basil kirchin is my friend – a trunk records sampler - trunk records - vinyl

New Copy

Genre: Soundtracks

1. Kitchen Kirchin Excerpt
2. Assignment K
3. Bells
4. Primitive London
5. Shuttered Room Effects Tape
6. Birds
7. Shuttered Room
8. Charcoal Sketch
9. Kitchen Kirchin Excerpt
10. Quantum
11. Rank Xerox
12. Kitchen Kirchin Excerpt
13. The Dice Is Cast
14. The Mustations
15. Birds & Bangs
16. Silicon Chip
17. Schurmatt Autistic Children Tape
18. E Me

A 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.

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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 we now know 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 he died. There is unreleased film music, field recordings including autistic children from Schurmatt, music for advertising, the opening of “Quantum”, 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.