basil kirchin: basil kirchin is my friend

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.