Jonny Trunk is a modern plunderer, a man who has obsessively collected sounds from hundreds of music libraries over the years, and this album is a distillation of some of those ideas, as Jonny puts it, “those tracks that are barely still aliveâ€. He wants us to think this all about him, but he would be quite happy for us to drop the “S’ in the title, and call this Crapbook. My guess is that this is in fact the Jonny Trunk humour, as Scrapbook is a rather wonderful collection of musical sketches, vignettes, mock-ups, unfinished musical passages just waiting for the right visuals.
This has to be the definition of a modern day library record, full of “moods’, music that can stand up on its own, but at the same time is crying out for some b-grade experimental cinema to add that last shot of life. Jonny is an obvious obsessive, he’ plundered and mined so many different styles from funk, and jazz, and he must have listened to every soundtrack ever composed, the detail in the tracks prove he is knowledgeable. Jonny Trunk uses a fair dose of exotica to elevate these songs to be more than just sketches, and this lightness used in conjunction to darker sounds of looped drum breaks and early synthesizers brooding and competing for space, is what makes this album a joy to listen to, and oh how fine it would be to have a visual accompaniment. Mesmerising.
As the footnote reads on the CD, go to www.trunkrecords.com and look at pictures, read stories and buy super things.
Wayne Stronell
