Big Elettronic Sound

Here's a quirky little thing.  It manages to combine all the things I like in one little dinky seven inches of vinyl - wonky jazz, electronic wizz, strange orchestrations and of course film music. Enjoy. 

Inner Space

I've been meaning to write something up on this wonderful documentary series for a while but it's taken myself and the family a couple of weeks to watch all thirteen episodes of this legendary Australian cult television show. Filmed in 1973 by sub aquatic explorers Ron and Val Taylor, the series finely balances factual documentary with dramatic oceanographic adventure, capturing an innocence and sense of playful wonder rarely seen on cinematic screen nowadays. It's compulsive viewing, a strange combination of aquatic sensuality, sublime cinematography, factual science, drama and of course the charming relationship of husband and wife team Ron and Val. As a youngster I remember my teenage brain being submerged by similiar documentaries, endless Film Board Of Canada documentaries on the deep sea with strange electronic scores, rainy Sunday afternoons transfixed by the underwater acrobatics of Frenchman Jacques Cousteau or watching from behind the sofa the subaqueous celluloid terror of Bruno Vailati's 'Jaws' cash-in films. Exotic televisual treats such as these, often but not always fueled by the success of 'Jaws', offered a form of escapism from the daily grim realities of growing up in the industrial belt of Scotland. These were other worlds, uncanny, hauntingly beautiful and sometimes fearful. 'Inner Space' is a delight to watch from start to finish and beautifully illustrates the extraordinary hypnotic power of underwater filmmaking. Episode 9,in particular, is a terrifying edge of the seat masterpiece of monstrous mondo exploitative film making. Steven Spielberg was apparently so impressed with this particular episode that he consequently changed his script to allow inclusion in the film 'Jaws'. 'Inner Space' is a cinematic wonder, charting strange, undiscovered waters and perhaps the only film I know of which features a charming aquadelic jazz soundtrack, man eating sharks and a William Shatner narration. An unclassifiable gem. Seek out.

Inner Space is out now on DVD on Votary Records. 

Way Of The Morris

More good news! My favourite purveyor of esoteric soundtrack recordings, Jonny Trunk, has started a new label called OST with the sole aim of releasing some of the more interesting proponents of contemporary film music out there. The first release on this new label is Adrian Corker's original soundtrack for Tim Plester's award winning documentary about the much ridiculed tradition of Morris dancing entitled “Way Of The Morris”. The film is a charming meditation on the curious role of folk traditions with contemporaneous culture and despite this rather oblique subject matter, the soundtrack is a wondrous mix of restrained electronics and ancient instrumentation and very much worthy of your attention. Utilizing field recordings from rural England, the music documents a strange and wonderful meeting place, where the sound of bells and whistles, voice and tradition, sticks and rushes blur and decay into a radiophonic otherworldliness. It is a weird mix indeed as shimmering glacial electronics elide into eccentric Moondog rhythmic patterns, joyous Bacchanalian reverie eerily echoes then dissolves into playful folk melody to suddenly side step into deeply meditative and cavernous melancholic disquiet creating an intoxicating amalgam of rural sounds. Compositionally, the soundtrack is both rich and emotive in tenor and style and wonderfully captures many of the contradictions of the preserving village green tradition within an industrial society. An utterly charming, idiosyncratic and very worthwhile release.

The "Way Of The Morris" soundtrack is released on OST on November 21st.

Once Around The Sun

Here’s another wonderful cultural artefact I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. ‘Once Around The Sun’ is a strange and visionary soundtrack to a forgotten Australian post Woodstock counter culture film. Filmed by sculptor and experimental filmmaker Gordon Mutch, a well known figure in the late sixties Sydney underground,the film set out to document the Australian freakout fraternities first foray into mass open-air festival. As far as I know, the film never made it off the cutting room floor which is a shame as the resultant soundtrack by John Sangster is masterpiece of beautifully restrained pastoral instrumentation and deep, dark, passages of hallucinatory orchestration. This is no cheap soundtrack of low budget psych exploitation but a fully formed cosmic suite of ambitious proportions. Cosmic tones of avant free form improvisation,jazz noir and interstellar big band swing collide. Imagine Stockhausen conducting the Arkestra and your halfway there. At times, the music is strangely propulsive, as strolling basslines percolate up through the deliriously shimmering dissonance and reverb saturated discordance. There are also oddly expansive, staring at the sun moments of peaked outsiderness as home made percussion, tabla, electronics and sitar echo and reverberate in the noon day breeze. Another fine archaeological resurrection by the stellar Australian label Roundtable.

Qui êtes vous, Polly Maggoo?

This little gem of a soundtrack has eluded me for years and it was a joy to finally hear it. 

Primitive London

Trunk Records continues to unearth and delve into the shadowy world of lost cinematic soundtracks with the release of a rather curious and oddly elegant score to a 1965 exploitation flick entitled “Primitive London”. The film itself, is a wonderfully unique and peculiar piece of British exploitative post war cinema. Filmed on a shoestring budget, with the sole intention of getting the punters in, this bizarrely engaging film by maverick director Arnold L. Miller is a strange and heady mix of skin flick, mondo exploitation and social documentary. The film sensationally combines sordid titillation, everyday banality and the downright bizarre, think boobs, bums, bikers, suburban swingers, beatniks, cheeky East End villains, glamorous showgirls, chicken processing plants and the latest developments in hair replacement surgery and you get the idea. Despite its best attempts to appear scandalously sensationalistic, the film captures a strangely peculiar pre-permissive Britain which is neither salacious nor shocking. The film proclaimed to scratch the thin veneer of respectability to discover a hidden world of crime and suppressed sexual desire waiting to vent but in reality what is presented is an oddball montage of schlock and tease, a second-rate, tawdry tour of the commonplace. Despite this, it’s a wonderfully engaging yet oddly surreal film but ultimately at the end of the show you're left with the feeling that the strippers depicted are not the only people who have ripped something off. This makes the accompanying soundtrack by composer Basil Kirchin even more remarkable in that the score is neither sensational nor sordid but a masterpiece of curiously elegant arrangement and compositional refinement. It’s beautifully haunting score which both compliments and transcends its cinematic setting. The music is gracefully rhythmical and shifts across a wide variety of moods and tempos while still retaining a singular and unique voice. The soundtrack is an unusual mix of baroque minimalism, cool post bop jazz, spectral orchestration and electronic experimentation which defies simplistic categorisation, an oddball one indeed. Like the score, Basil Kirchin is a bit of an oddity. He apparently spent five months in a Ramakrishna Temple in India a decade before it became fashionable. In the early sixties he created experimental “soundtracks for unmade films” using collaged ambient sounds and if this all sounds a bit Eno before Eno, he could also confidently compose in a bizarre range of musical styles and idioms. How he happened to become involved in scoring music for the nefarious and seedy underbelly of British cinema remains a mystery, perhaps a true meeting of the sublime and the ridiculous. This soundtrack is yet another meticulous reclamation of a hidden musical past by label owner Jonny Trunk and if the world is a just place, his residence will have a Blue Plaque promptly installed to commemorate his significant contribution to a very peculiar kind of cultural and musical archaeology. A fascinating and strangely beautiful release.

“Primitive London” is released on Trunk Records this month.

Malá Morská Víla

Watching "Malá Morská Víla", the Czechoslovakian film adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" is like being drowned in an intoxicating blend of sub aquatic loneliness and surreal bittersweet enchantment. The film has a dark eerie, dreamlike quality which is enhanced by the wonderful mixture of set design by Ester Krumbachová [who was responsible for much of the visual inventiveness of films such as "Daises" and "Valerie & Her Week Of Wonders"] and a beguiling orchestral/electronic score by composer Zdeněk Liška.  Much of the film is set underwater and there is an overwhelming undercurrent of sadness throughout, especially during the underwater scenes which  are often filmed with a limited colour palette and a haunting use of slow motion cinematography. Director, Karel Kachyňa achieved international recognition for his poetic films of the mid to late sixties but this film is an unsung masterpiece, a veritable treat for both the ears and the eyes.  The film score for "Malá Morská Víla" will be released by Finders Keepers some time in Winter 2010.

Daughters Of Air

Nowhere To Go

Just a little post to say that the ever wonderful Jonny, of Trunk Records is giving away this rather nifty jazz film score EP (free, yes that's right, free) when you subscribe to his mailing list.

Nowhere To Go was a 1958 London crime flick starring a young Maggie Smith and if this soundtrack is anything to go by, the film may also be worthy of your attention.

"Have a listen anyway, it's a curious thing and has some good bits, especially the crazy drum cowbell thing." Jonny Trunk

Children Of The Stones

Children of the Stones was a complex and disturbing television drama produced for children by HTV in 1976. I remember being literally petrified by this programme, particularly the title sequence. As a youngster, I found its soundtrack both intensely otherworldly and deeply troubling. The music was composed by Sidney Sager who used a combination of a cappella vocalizations of a single, repeated Icelandic word ("Hadave") to create a terrifying and dissonant score. The vocals were provided by the Ambrosian Singers who during their long career have provided choral work for both Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota. The series was filmed at Avebury, Wiltshire during Summer 1976, with interior scenes filmed at HTV's Bristol studio.  The score for this series has never been commercially issued, which is a shame as both the "Start Title" and the "Ritual And End Title" are some of the scariest music I've heard on television.

Tokyo Sonata

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Tokyo Sonata" is a filmic masterpiece of unsettling domestic tension. The premise of the plot revolves around a family's impending financial ruin after a middle-aged company man is abruptly fired from his well-heeled Tokyo job. Every morning he leaves the house dressed in his coat and tie, and spends his days roaming the urban environment [which typically in Tokyo indicates 4,000 inhabitants per square kilometre] in search of work, leaving his family unaware of their socio economic plight. The film’s tone is typified by the wonderfully eerie and pastoral score by Kazumasa Hashimoto.  The score contains a few tracks which typify what only can be described as ghostly electronic folk music.  Here is a "Unten Take 1" but I recommend you seek out the entire score as soon as possible.  Another wonderful Jonny Trunk tip!