Rather than do the back-handed compliment review thing for The Wire I stuck my neck out and penned this about the Johnny Trunk record, was *JUST ABOUT* to send it to them when (er woops) found some twit named Ken Hollings had already reviewed it (probably in the late 90s). My spiel is better.
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JOHNNY TRUNK
THE INSIDE OUTSIDE
TRUNK RECORDINGS JBH008CD
You inevitably arrive at The Inside Outside with a head full of scripts. Johnny Trunk is the man behind Trunk records and responsible for notable re-issues such as Basil Kirchin's "Quantum" and Jon Cameron's OST "Kes." Johnny has a soundtracks-only show on Resonance FM. But you'd be wrong if you had his own music pegged as either reverential or slavishly 'breaks-oriented." One might expect as much from one of the diggerati.
The whole record is characterised by charming whimsicality and a casual creative fecundity. Like such notorious predecessors as Position Normal and De La Soul, Johnny is mining old records not just for loops but for atmospheres. He shares with outfits like The Focus Group (the project of Stereolab sleeve designer House) an intense affection for the mustiness of early 1960s Britain, an universe populated by Diana Dors, British Jazz musicians in session for KPM, Gainsborough Studios, Donald Cammell, and shoe-string sonic pioneers like the Joe Meek and Delia Derbyshire; an unintentionally seedy world and a brazenly cheap mirror-image of American glamour. Trunk takes delight in this fustiness and spiv-ery.
There is precious little sonic pressure in the tracks here, which flow in a manner akin to the liminal grooves of discarded library records. Tunes like "Sister Woo" would have had their samples (what sounds like a Bacharach loop) stripped clean of off-kilter wobble and polished into chrome turd in lesser hands. Johnny makes it stutter and lurch drunkenly like an accountant in a Soho basement. With "Asylum" and it's lopsided kick-drum, discordant pianner and plaintive flute things just get odder. While not crackling quite as shamelessly as the Position Normal oeuvre here's something as seductively pointless. There is also much in the way of sheer loveliness here. For example "Nine Bob Note" and it's delicate backwards-bossa flecked with glockenspiels and cor anglais, drums and bass compressed into billowing feather-soft cushions. Likewise the exquisite "Deep In a Dream" which displays a truly musical lightness of touch, harps, flutes and fluttering tom-toms spun together from disparate samples with elan, the track twisting gently in time. Also "Zeus" with it's sepulchural hushed choir and after-image strings.
Of course you expect a little Jazz-Funk-styled 'Trip-Hop' action, and in "Curl One Out" you get it, but the territory is always thankfully close to Wagon Christs's similarily 'second-hand and proud' "Throbbing Pouch." It comes as a surprise that this most cravenly backwards-looking nexus of the obscure record collector could produce something as fresh and light.
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Do you hate reviews in blogs too? Well fak off.
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I met Trunk the other day and he was well cocky so let's hope he doesn't read this.
Posted by Woebot at July 25, 2004 10:57 PM