| a dream logic |
[Jul. 22nd, 2008|12:17 am] |
New destinations sometimes necessitate new modes of travel. Or is it that new modes of travel open up visions of new places to go? In Basil Kirchin's case his present position has been reached after many years of travelling along more traditional music routes.
I wondered how to lure you into the world of composer Basil Kirchin.
Heres the opening of The Abominable Dr. Phibes.
Vincent Price leads the clockwork orchestra.
As I compile a Basil Kirchin playlist on Youtube to collect all the movie clips featuring his soundtrack work, I came across one description for the 1974 movie Mutations aka Freakmaker, which sums up where I am at with this Internet thing. stylish chase scene from Jack Cardiff's THE MUTATIONS. pure dream logic even in context. watch for the signs. Tell me you get it. The chord changes and plucked bass moves. The occasional horn blare. The rippling vibes and bells. The merging of incidental field sounds with music composition.
Kirchin was a house hero of field recording and found sound fans on Soulseek and elsewhere in the early part of this century. His musical career spanned the 60s and 70s. His name was dropped by arch psychedelic obscurantist, Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound which may have brought him to the fore in the Solar Lodge (a Soulseek Room). Others reviving the textures of soundtrack music and lounge interests for the space age pop thing of the Nineties, like Stereolab referred to him.
Here's a 2003 interview with Kirchin on BBC Radio 3's eclectic Mixing It show. Ahh I remember that night well!
His soundtrack music follows certain formats extending his earlier jazz band training with his father. There are touches of the ITC big band sound of TV series like The Champions.
  
Later, the electronics and recorded found sound infiltrate the music as in the opening and closing credits of Mutations (1974). This is when he released an album called Worlds Within Worlds, which was a real prize piece of experimentalism to catch hold of during the digital potlatch dream of all night chat and share around 2004.
Eventually this pressure resulted in releases of his rare material by Johnny Trunk of Trunk Records.
The soundtrack music is uncollected at present and - apart from Dr Phibes - is unavailable, except from the new breed of potlatch, who like myself moved from audio to audio/video and the way sound services the image. Finding old obscure films sometimes looks trivial but it does yield some interesting and beguiling gems in the fabric of dream logic!
It's almost like the buzz of what crate digging samples of obscure old vinyl did for Rap and Hip-Hop DJ's.
Of course that whole lounge scene has been and gone and yet did the train ever really arrive in the station of your minds!!
Finally, there's a bit of personal psychogeography to add to this bubbling hypnopomp:The Kirchin band, co-led and directed by his father Ivor, originated when Basil took their London-based band up to Edinburgh for a residency at the Fountainbridge Palais, beginning there on September 8th, 1952. The band made several broadcasts from Fountainbridge My parents may have even danced to his early music!
Here's my Kirchin playlist on Youtube. Dig it before it gets nuked!
See Oliver Reed as the island psycho.
Jenny Agutter and the old house.
Vincent Price and his clockwork orchestra.
Northern girls stripping in seedy Soho during the "swingin' sixties".
"If you take the human voice and slow it down five octaves, immediately everything you can hear drops away. Take birdsong, all those harmonics you can't hear are brought down - sounds that human ears have never heard before. Little boulders of sound. In 1964 it was hard to capture. There was only reel to reel tape, and it took eight or nine years of my life. It was long and hard and painful. Now with the new technology you can hear these boulders of sound without changing the pitch, which is miraculous!"
On and off through the Sixties and Seventies, Kirchin stayed in an autistic community at Schurmatt in Switzerland. "These autistic children, the sounds they make when they try to communicate are unbelievable. They jabber away and of course it's gibberish and meaningless. But if you record it and apply the techniques I've mentioned...trust me, you can hear what they're trying to convey."
Interview with Bob Stanley, 2003 |
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