Basil Kirchin - Basil Kirchin Is My Friend: A Trunk Records Sampler (Basil Kirchin) (2017)

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 we now know as “ambient”. Here, in this unique Trunk Record’s sampler, we offer 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."

Tracklist:
1-1. Basil Kirchin - Kitchen Kirchin Excerpt 1 (00:32)
1-2. Basil Kirchin | John Coleman - Assignment K 3 (01:53)
1-3. Basil Kirchin - Bells (01:26)
1-4. Basil Kirchin - Primitive London 2 (02:08)
1-5. Basil Kirchin - Shuttered Room Effects Tape (00:12)
1-6. Basil Kirchin - Birds 2 (00:42)
1-7. Basil Kirchin | Jack Nathan - Shuttered Room 5 (01:07)
1-8. Basil Kirchin - Charcoal Sketch 2 (03:22)
1-9. Basil Kirchin - Kitchen Kirchin Excerpt 2 (00:46)
1-10. Basil Kirchin - Quantum Part 1 (Opening section) (07:58)
1-11. Basil Kirchin - Rank Xerox 1 (00:48)
1-12. Basil Kirchin - Kitchen Kirchin Excerpt 3 (00:26)
1-13. Basil Kirchin - The Dice Is Cast (02:31)
1-14. Basil Kirchin | Jack Nathan - The Mutations 5 (02:14)
1-15. Basil Kirchin - Birds And Bangs (01:08)
1-16. Basil Kirchin - Silicon Chip (04:10)
1-17. Basil Kirchin - Schurmatt Austistic Children Tape (01:12)
1-18. Basil Kirchin - E+Me (10:03)