What The Hell Is That Noise?

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

av Jonny Trunk

1.9.09

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

Annons

(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.