the record business may not have much of a future,
but it’s got one hell of a past; sales are plummeting, sending
the industry into a state of panicked paralysis, but one of the His sleuthing unearthed the work of maverick composers
few growth zones is ‘salvage’. That’s writer John Carney’s term such as Basil Kirchin and Desmond Leslie. The latter’s Music of
for the modus operandi of labels such as LTM, Soul Jazz and the Future (1955–9), homespun musique concrète recorded in the
Anthology, who comb the back-catalogues of defunct record late 1950s, is one of the label’s great discoveries. An ex-Spitfire
companies in search of out-of-print nuggets. Then there’s Trunk, pilot and UFO expert, Leslie was a non-musician who fancied
currently celebrating a decade of quirky excavations with the sparring with Pierres Schaeffer and Henry. “A member of the
compilation Now We Are Ten. landed gentry,” says Trunk, “he could afford to throw rotating
The label is 38-year-old Jonny Trunk’s ingenious way of fans and buckets of sand into pianos.” Another recently reissued
making his unhealthy obsessions – specifically, the compulsion gem is the library album made by Derbyshire (moonlighting
to dig in dusty crates for vintage vinyl – work for him. In recent from her Beeb day job under the alias Russe) and later used
years, the word ‘curate’ has become a slightly annoying buzzword to soundtrack the children’s TV science-fiction series The
in the hipster music scene, with people pompously describing Tomorrow People (1973). The library obsession culminated with
functions hitherto designated more prosaically as ‘pulling an attractive compendium of sleeves Trunk pulled together for
together a compilation’, ‘running a record label’ or ‘booking the design-book publisher Fuel. Ranging from stark modernist
bands for a festival’ in terms of curating. Still, if anybody deserves grids to surreal photocollages, from kitschadelic Op art to
to be thought of in these terms, it’s Trunk (who also writes about bizarrely clumsy drawings that suggest a macabre compulsion
music and deejays frequently, in clubs and on his regular show for akin to outsider art on the part of the draughtsman, the artwork
London’s Resonance FM). Along with like-minded operatives collected in The Music Library (2005) shows how library
such as Saint Etienne, Broadcast and the Focus Group, Trunk covers could be as inadvertently avant-garde as the music
explores music’s archives in search of lost futures and alternate they packaged. Which isn’t so surprising, given that both were
presents. As much as a historian as an entrepreneur, he remaps produced in factory conditions where utilitarian practicality and
the past, finding the paths-not-taken and the peculiar but fertile experimental impulses coexisted on a tight budget.
backwaters adjacent to pop’s official narrative. On Trunk’s website there’s the slogan ‘music, sex and
Trunk got into the creative curatorship game with the nostalgia’. The sex comes into it through his interest in vintage
label’s very first release, The Super Sounds of Bosworth (1996), porn, which he claims is all about the period aesthetics rather than
which was also the world’s first compilation of library music. any prurient use-value. In 2003 he put out Flexi Sex, a collection
Bosworth is the company that pioneered the library concept: of the ultra-lewd spoken-word flexi-singles that 1970s porn
incidental music for use in radio, cinema advertisements, industrial mags used to stick between their soon-to-be-stuck-together
films and other non-glamorous contexts, sold by subscription pages. Porn also informed one of the label’s few non-reissue
rather than in shops, and issued in institutional-looking sleeves releases, Dirty Fan Male (2004), which involved an actor known
with helpful track descriptions (‘neutral underscore’, ‘pathetic, as Wisbey reading out, in an assortment of comedic voices, the
grotesque’). By the early 1990s, library records from the 1960s filthy fan letters sent to British softcore porn stars. The CD has
and 70s had become highly prized by hip hop producers for become a cult item, inspiring Trunk to turn it into a stage show,
their sample-ready cornucopia of crisply recorded and session which played at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2004 and won
musician-played beats, fanfares and refrains. The Guardian’s Best Concept award.
In addition to lushly orchestrated soundtrack-style To ‘music, sex and nostalgia’, three other Trunk keywords
themes and hot snippets of funk and jazz, the library companies could be added. Humour: a good-natured whimsy pervades
generated plenty of wacked-out experimental sounds, often the whole project. Britishness: nearly everything on the label
using analogue synthesizers. That’s what snagged Trunk’s was made in the UK, and there’s an affectionate fascination for
attention. As a child, the first melody he ever sang was the all aspects of this country’s postwar popular culture (the label’s
Doctor Who theme (1963), whose electronic rendition by Delia website is packed with Anglo curios Trunk has stumbled upon,
Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop sent shudders from an album by Stanley Unwin, the comedian who spoke
of anticipatory fear through millions of kids’ bodies every week. in an invented gobbledygook language, to a record by the
Later, as a teenager, Trunk became obsessed with the weird showjumper Harvey Smith). Keyword three is ‘melancholy’: Now
electronica “played on Open University programmes, like when We Are Ten teems with softly sad film music by composers such
there was a sequence about microbes”. But he could never find as John Cameron and Sven Libaek.
out who made it. Then “someone played me a Bosworth album, Cheesy sleaze and sepia-toned melancholy seem unlikely
and I thought, ‘that’s it, the Open University sound!’” Spotting bedfellows at first glance. In his 1936 travelbook Journey Without
the company’s address on the back of the record, he “just walked Maps, Graham Greene put his finger on or near the place
around the corner” to their office in central London and “knocked where musty and lust meet. He wrote about how ‘seediness has
on the door”, finding inside a “Hammer House of Horror scene” of a very deep appeal… It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense
decades-old dust and teetering piles of sheet music. of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage
further back.’ With their aura of wistful reverie and faded decay,
the sounds exhumed by Trunk offer a portal into this nation’s
cultural unconscious.
Top left: Signori: l’Orchestra! Sleeve design: anonymous Music by Guiliano Sorgini. All images courtesy of Trunk Records
Mixed Media_Sound.indd 3 3/8/07 12:24:45
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