Basil Kirchin

Worlds Within Worlds

Island Records HELP 18

• Boomkat Product Review:

  Holy mother of noise, what the devil have we here? Superior Viaduct cough up the 1st ever vinyl reissue of Basil Kirchin’s mind-blowing experimental masterpiece Worlds Within Worlds, which has bafflingly somehow escaped wider attention until now. While Trunk Records have done a fantastic job of returning Kirchin’s work to critical acclaim since their issue of Quantum in 2003, this very necessary reissue inarguably and surely reasserts the British jazz drummer and composer-cum-studio experimentalist among electronic music’s greatest pioneers. Trust, this is a record you’ve been looking for forever, but just didn’t know it existed!

  Conceived as the follow-up to Kirchin’s Worlds Within Worlds parts 1 & 2, which were discernibly scored for a jazz sextet (including Evan Parker) and various bird, animal, and amplified insect sounds, and released on LP by Columbia in 1971, Kirchin’s 1974 follow-up of the same name contains parts 3 & 4 and finds him combining similar instrumentation with the sounds of a Gorilla, Hornbills, and Flamingoes in a heavily abstract, tape-processed style that’s just completely messing us up right now.

  If any LP deserves the mantle “lost classic”, it’s this one. From the first seconds of distended, hellish moans and flanging analog artefacts in Emergence (Part 3) you know this is going to be a serious trip and it never once sells the listener short. For the next 20 minutes he unspools a fantasy tableaux of warped, grainy harmonics and warbling sonic oddity, smudging samples of autistic children in a Swiss community with the sounds of the docks in Hull, where he lived, to forge a practically unprecedented alternate dimension of atonal, arrhythmic immersion that genuinely feel like a transmission from the other side, much in the best way of music from Aphex Twin thru to Broadcast or NWW.

  On the B-side Evolution (Part 4) follows suit into the void without the handrails of convention, effectively landing somewhere between the combustible, metallurgic experiments of Gottfried Michael König, Annea Lockwood’s Tiger Balm, and the vast, cosmic spectral music of Iancu Dumitrescu in terms of space and texture, with 18 minutes of dense, layered concrète chicanery that pulls the ear’s eye almost out of its socket in a seamless, keening traversal of metastable, decelerated sonics from Gorilla growls to submerged clangour and astral flange that uncannily parallels COUM Transmissions from the same era and city, although we’re pretty sure there was no crossover between the two.

  Suffice it to say, this record is one of the best things to ever come out of Yorkshire or the British electronic music underbelly. Just fucking incredible, psychedelic music. Highly recommended!

• Unwinding history - catching a glimpse of its truths, can be a near impossible task. There’s an understandable tendency to look in the obvious places, seeking generality and concise definition to guide the way. While this presents obvious paradoxes within the fields of avant-garde sound practice and experimental music - territories which, by their very nature, are resistant to genre, categorization, and definition, the impulse persists, allowing strange and singular free-standing efforts to slip through the cracks. This has long been the case for the remarkable sounds generated by Basil Kirchin, a composer who, until recently, history has largely ignored. Having fallen within the loving gaze of the San Francisco based Superior Viaduct - part of their broad effort to draw attention to remarkable and neglected gems from the histories of underground and avant-garde musics, the label returns with a beautifully produced reissue of Kirchin’s seminal 1974 LP, Worlds Within Worlds.

  A likely reasoning for the absence of Basil Kirchin within historic narratives, is the breadth of territory his work bridged, and the fact that it resisted well defined notions of genre and movement. He began is life as a musician during his early teens, when, like his friend Derek Bailey, he got his start playing in jazz dance bands in the north of England. A drummer by trade, his recording career began within his father’s big band, before producing a number of releases for the library music imprints Music De Wolfe and KPM Music. Despite of the quality of these releases, had Kirchin stopped there, it’s likely that he would have remained even more overlooked.

As Brian Eno writes in the liner notes on the original release, "Within the first couple of minutes it became obvious to me that Basil had not only discovered a whole new area of sound, but had exploited it with extreme skill and sensitivity, producing beautiful and evocative music as well.... So Basil Kirchin has made a double contribution: he has not only built the instrument, but has written and played the first successful works for it." [Review Soundohm.com]

Label: Island HELP 18

Country: UK

Released: 1974

Zustand / Condition Vinyl:   Near mint

Zustand / Condition Cover: Very Good

• Matrix / Runout (Side A runout, stamped - variant 1): HELP 18 A-2U  A
• Matrix / Runout (Side B runout, stamped - variant 1): HELP 18 B-2U  G

Shipping to Switzerland and Great Britain 13,50 €

GOLDMINE GRADING STANDARD &
COMMON ABBREVIATIONS

Vinyl: Nahezu perfekt, geringfügige Gebrauchsspuren können zu sehen sein, aber die Platte wurde offensichtlich mit extremer Vorsicht behandelt.

Cover: Ebenfalls nahezu neu, nur sehr geringfügige Gebrauchsspuren.

Vinyl: Near perfect. Very minor scuffs and very little else appears on the vinyl. Any damage will most likely have occurred during packaging or removing the record from the inner sleeve but has been handled with extreme care.

Cover: The cover looks close to perfect with only minor signs of wear and/or age.

Vinyl: Es können sichtbare und auch hörbare Gebrauchsspuren zu finden sein, aber sehr geringfügig.

Cover: Das 'Artwork' ist unversehrt, keine Beschriftungen auf dem Cover. Beschädigte Ecken und Kanten können vorkommen, aber niemals in extremem Maße.

Vinyl: In excellent condition for vinyl but allows for minor scuffs which are visible but only slightly.

Cover: Artwork looks as close to perfect as can be. There may be some impressions to the cover but no writting on cover. Some slight creases to the corners, but not wrinkled and obtrusive to the eye.

Vinyl: Nebengeräusche können auftreten, aber nur gelegentlich, niemals die ganze Zeit.

Cover: Normale Alterserscheinungen, wenn abnormale Beschädigungen, wie abgelöste Coverklebung, Beschriftungen zu finden sind, sind diese gesondert erwähnt, sofern sie nicht auf dem Photo sichtbar sind.

Vinyl: May crackle, pop or make other annoying noises, but only occasionally, never continuously, and not more loudly than the music being listened to.

Cover: Normal used cover wear such as ring wear and split seams. If there is abnormal damage such as tears or markings, it is described in comments attached to the item.

Vinyl: Kontinuierliches Knistern ist zu erwarten, aber nicht so laut, dass die Musik unhörbar oder ungeniessbar wird, könnte auch 1 oder 2 'fiese Kratzer' haben und an diesen Stellen springen, aber höchtens bei 1-2 Liedern.

Cover: Starke Gebrauchserscheinungen. Aber nicht gerissen. Die Coverklebung könnte gelöst sein, aber nicht mit etwas anderem als Tesa-Band repariert.

Vinyl: May have continuous low level crackles, pops, etc. but not so loud as to make the music completely unlistenable or unenjoyable to the casual listener. May also have more serious scratches causing popping on one or two songs, with the rest of record playing fine.

Cover: May have various kinds of wears and tears but is not torn. It may have seam splits that are not repaired with anything other than scotch tape.

Vinyl: Kaum zu gebrauchen. Die Platte rauscht normalerweise von vorne bis hinten. Es können gelegentlich schwere Störgeräusche auftreten, auch ein Sprung ist nicht auszuschließen.

Vinyl: Mostly quite noisy the whole way through, may have heavy scratches and might even skip.

Cover: Possibly torn, taped or written on, but not all at once.

Vinyl: Nur wenige Songs sind noch genießbar

Cover: Könnte total kaputt sein.

Vinyl Only one or two songs on the whole album playable.

Cover: Torn, taped and written on.

Common Abbrevations / Gängige Abkürzungen