What The Hell Is That Noise?

BY JONNY TRUNK

As a child I’d watch crap late-night films on British TV and say “wow” a lot at how great all the music and backgrounds were in movies—especially the slightly weirder and often ruder films from Italy or France.

Every weekend, instead of buying the latest pop or indie releases at my local record shop, I’d spend my time in second-hand crapholes digging about for discarded film music and anything slightly related. By the time I was 18, I’d started to meet like-minded souls, collectors, dealers, and other slightly peculiar people who owned shops that specialised in this film music thing. So I kept going, learning more, collecting more and absorbing as much film music and soundtrack information that I could. I even started a record label, Trunk Records, and one of the first things we released was the soundtrack to

The Wicker Man

(decades before “dark folk” had its resurgence).

These days, a lot of film music falls into a generic slushy pool of shit compilations and reverbed moody piano, or they offer up a wall of shockingly poor techno drums and soft studio horribleness that makes my ears hurt. I believe the golden age of film music was really in the 1960s and 70s. There were good ideas, funny instruments, bleak arrangements, and a sense of a really peculiar person playing them in a darkened room.

Here are my favourites.

Ghost Dance (1995)

Cunningham/Muir/Giles

Piano

I have no idea what this film is about, and don’t really care either. That happens with a lot of film music, you can’t really watch all the films, and often when you do it can be quite a disappointment, especially if you like the music. The score here is by David Cunningham, an interesting man who was part of the Flying Lizards. They made a classic hit cover version of the Beatles’ “Money” using the sound of students whacking trays up and down in their university canteen. Here, Cunningham and his trio are using lots of peculiar instruments, the most ear-catching of which is the mouth horn. The first time you hear it is confusing and disarming, as you have never heard a noise like it. Cunningham also manages to arrange his sounds in a magical way, which means you have to keep listening.

Nightmares Come at Night

(Aka Les Cauchemars Naissent la Nuit) (1970)

Bruno Nicolai

Digitmovies

This was never issued at the time of the film but it was rescued and pressed recently by a great bunch of Italians with good taste. It’s a film all about killing and girls, with music by Bruno Nicolai, one of the great twisted Italian arrangers. On this fine horror recording, you will experience lots of very simple things: simple melodies, tunes with just one string noise repeating itself for ages, that sort of thing—and all with this very subtle darkness trotting around in the background. On the back of the CD I have stuck a Post-it note for when I DJ film music, and on it I wrote the following: “Track 3 amazing string thing, track 7 insane six minutes carousel number, track 9 spooky jazz for 8 minutes.” For me, it doesn’t get much better.

Inner Space—The Lost Film Music of Sven Libaek (1963–’73)

Sven Libaek

Trunk Records

This guy is a Norwegian who went to Australia in the early 1960s and never went home again. I had a cup of coffee with him once in a really terrible café in the main train station in Sydney. He was wearing a slightly peculiar suit. Musically, Sven has a very unique jazzy sound. It’s all warm and lovely and happy and friendly, but still has the capacity to be quite strange when required. Sven also made some really great library music, but it’s not as good as his film music. After our meeting in the crap café, I managed to put together the first compilation of his lovely music and it has a great white shark on the front cover. His music spans a broad range of film, from outback police movies to a gay rites-of-passage movie to documentaries about the world under the sea. There is no doubt that Libaek has a strangely addictive signature sound, but most importantly it’s the sort of music you can guess what kind of movie it’s for.

The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun (1968)

Farm

Rebel Records

When you start digging around in the peculiar world of film music, all these sub-genres and sub-sub-genres start appearing. One such example is surf movie music, and there’s a whole load of great surf movie soundtracks that you can drop into any cool surfing conversation and no one will know what the hell you are on about because they are just so obscure. This is a perfect example. It’s a film made by George Greenough, possibly the greatest surfing maverick of all time. His gang of surf-bum mates made the music, which is the perfect accompaniment to Greenough’s groundbreaking footage in the middle of wild waves. This works so well because the musicians were living and breathing the lifestyle they then had to soundtrack. One of the compositions is called “Coming of the Dawn” and it’s this ten-minute throbbing jam based on surfing in the dark until the sun comes up.

The Big Silence (Aka Il Grande Silenzio) (1968)

Ennio Morricone

Beat/Parade

No soundtrack list can call itself complete without one of the 400 or so scores by Morricone. This is a great one, made better by the fact that the film is so utterly sublime too. What sets this apart from your average spaghetti Western score is the fact that it is a movie shot in the snow, and not the desert. As a result, Morricone has given the music this kind of glacial panoramic oddness, and listening to it gives you an instant awe-inspiring feeling, just like you get standing on top of a mountain. The mind boggles at just how amazing a composer Morricone is. He’ll happily make music just using a piano and violin, but I think he’s happiest with a chorus of mental people and a large box of funny instruments that make noises like a pet shop on fire. He’s about as avant-garde as you can get, and even after about 20 years of listening to him I still find it baffling how someone can be that brilliant and so varied, so often.

The Conversation (1974)

David Shire

Intrada Special/Columbia

The man in charge of the soundtrack recordings for this early Coppola movie was called Walter Murch. He is a hero of mine. The soundtrack recording from this film is incredible because the film is all about a wire tapper, a guy who bugs people. There is an important conversation that is recorded at the beginning of the film, but it’s not complete. This incomplete, warped recording is then placed throughout the soundtrack and it gets me very excited indeed. Almost a bit too excited, so I don’t watch the film too often. The actual music on the film is by David Shire, a very complex, talented piano man. His theme is haunting in its total simplicity, and when you add this to the unnerving, distorted conversation recordings, we have a very powerful soundtrack like no other. Murch went on to handle the sound in

The Godfather

films and

Apocalypse Now

.

It’s a Revolution Mother (1968)

Various

K&W Records

Another of the great and very popular soundtrack sub-genres is the charming world of biker movies. Under this same musical umbrella you can place any soundtracks with students revolting or love-children being groovy. Top of the pile is this one, mainly because it took me about ten years to find a copy. It’s all taken from real life at the time, so the soundtrack is made up of the fabulous bikers, hippies, and revolutionary kids droning on and on about how totally way-out their lives are and how many drugs they take all the time. The best bit is this biker, one of the One Percenters gang, who has this long, stoned monologue about getting on his hog butt-naked and going out for long evening trips. “Jesus died so he could ride,” apparently. And this is all accompanied by a trippy drum and guitar thing that sort of drags you in and then burrows itself deep into your head.

Soundtracks (1960-’70)

Arthur Lipsett

Global A Records

Arthur Lipsett was this talented Canadian who was obsessed with sound. So much so that he started collecting off-cuts from old sound reels and splicing them together into strange but mesmerising sound montages. They were so interesting that his mates suggested he made films to go along with them, which he did. The results are really not like anything else you have seen. They are really mad, and his timing with sounds is magical. He had a profound influence on some very important people, like Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas. One of Lipsett’s films, 1964’s

21-87

, is apparently where “The Force” we all know from

Star Wars

has its genesis. Most of Lipsett’s short movies are on YouTube. Watch them and remember that he made the soundtracks first. And try to spot the mention of “The Force” on

21-87.

La Course en Tête (1974)

David Munrow

EMI Pathe

Imagine you are watching a documentary about the Tour de France. Yes, all those muscular thin men hammering their way up and down mountains on expensive bikes, occasionally crashing and normally wearing those funny little hats. Now imagine it all back in about 1972 when the bikes were heavier and the whole sport was dominated by a bloke called Eddie Merckx. He was from Belgium and had a fine pair of legs. Now finally imagine footage of the race, but with a musical accompaniment of traditional 16th and 17th century music. It’s an incredible juxtaposition of sound and vision that bizarrely works. David Munrow was the bloke behind it all, a tragic musical genius who knew more about ancient instruments than history itself. There’s one track on the score simply called “Oh Death Rock Me Asleep”, which is so utterly sublime it sends shivers everywhere. Apparently David Munrow killed himself through depression and suppressed homosexuality. It’s a real shame he’s not with us now.

The Hill (1965)

Nobody

Out soon on Trunk Records!

This movie is very intense indeed. Picture Sean Connery, Ian Bannen, Harry Andrews and Roy Kinnear all in this wretched, torturous army prison in the desert. And all filmed in black and white. Everyone sweats loads. There’s a masochistic punishment where the soldiers have to climb up this giant sand hill over and over again. Everyone shouts all the time but the dialogue is poetic and powerful. The whole film is bleak and dark and evil. The reason I like this soundtrack is because there isn’t one. Musically, it’s a totally silent film. There isn’t even a theme. There is no music anywhere. But there is an inspired use of sound. There is a lot of shouting and a particularly disturbing gas mask scene. I believe more films and especially TV should drop music altogether. It shows respect for the actors, the narrative, the dialogue and the film, but most importantly, respect for the audience. I’ll tell you what, I’m going to issue the soundtrack to

The Hill

as this two-sided blank album with a great cover of Connery looking sweaty and moody. Great idea. I’m on it.