Charcoal Sketches/States Of Mind

Following on the success of 2003's Quantum, Trunk Records created a prequel of sorts from British jazz musician and experimental composer Basil Kirchin's private tape stash. Recorded in 1968 and previously unreleased, the two halves of Charcoal Sketches/States of Mind contain early iterations of ideas Kirchin would more fully explore on his two Worlds Within Worlds releases in the early '70s and on Quantum itself. The three brief songs of Charcoal Sketches, as the title implies, are not quite so much complete, stand-alone recordings as they are rough drafts of the underlying concept behind the Worlds Within Worlds album: the songs themselves are jazzy easy listening tunes, akin in tone to much of Kirchin's soundtrack work from the period, such as his theme (with vocals by Jenny Agutter) for the 1969 psychological horror film I Start Counting. However, using a first-generation portable Nagra tape recorder that was then a state of the art machine, Kirchin went into the mountainous forest near his home in Barden, Switzerland and recorded tapes of birdsong and other animal noises that he then electronically processed. Manipulated tapes such as this are an integral part of Quantum, and contribute greatly to that album's at times deeply unsettling soundcapes, but on these three tracks, they're merely laid over the mellow cocktail-lounge grooves; the tracks' odd sound mix, which often makes the harshly processed, metallic-sounding noises louder than the music itself, doesn't help. A subtler mix could have created something more like a postmodern take on Martin Denny's famous tiki lounge material, where the pianist would improvise birdcalls over his combo's playing, but as it stands, these tracks are an interesting idea that never quite gels. According to label head Jonny Trunk's liner notes, the nine pieces that make up States of Mind were written and recorded as the soundtrack for a short film about mental disorders shown at an international conference of psychologists and psychiatrists held at London's Earl's Court in 1968. Featuring free jazz soprano saxophonist Evan Parker and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler (here on flugelhorn) in front of an orchestral string section, these nine brief pieces are in fact startling early examples of the free improv movement in British jazz. Ranging from 40 seconds to just under four minutes, the pieces aren't long enough to provide either Parker or Wheeler a proper platform for soloing, but they do provide a unique meeting place of collective improvisation and post-Romantic modern classical music that was positively avant-garde for its time and place. What on earth did those doctors think of this movie? Sadly, that reaction, along with the film itself, is lost to the ages; cleverly, for the album Jonny Trunk gave the untitled music cues to a London neurologist, Dr. Rachel Genn, and she both titled the songs with medical terminology and wrote brief descriptions of each from a physician's perspective. (e.g., for the woozy, disorienting "Spiked": "this track sounds like acid, but I didn't take any.") Overall, Charcoal Sketches/States of Mind leans more towards the trainspotter type of collector than Quantum had; though these pieces are arguably more immediately accessible than that knotty two-part work, they're clearly minor works that the casual fan of the Trunk Records aesthetic won't find as crucial. ~ Stewart Mason|