Two sublime unreleased scores from Basil Kirchin. The next Trunk/Kirchin assignment. Basically some more unreleased music from the unpredictable and slightly chaotic Kirchin Tape Archive. These tapes were labelled up as follows: Assignment K (with lots of pencil scribbles everywhere); The Strange Affair (with lots of pen scribbles everywhere). As usual with Basil tapes/things there is little else to go on, no tracklist, no list of musicians, no singer names, no dates or anything. Assignment K dates from 1968, and was a film about a toy maker who has a double life as an international spy. It was directed by Val Guest, who’d just finished trying to rescue the cinematic hotchpotch that was Casino Royale — he had been brought in by the Bond producers after Peter Sellers had walked off the movie. As for the Kirchin score here, there is very little information, apart from the fact that the bass player was Ron Prentice (an ex blacksmith turned musician and craftsman) who worked on several Bond scores. The Strange Affair is also from 1968, and was not only controversial but also a reasonably unsuccessful movie. Directed by David Greene who also directed, amongst other films, I Start Counting and the brilliant Sebastian. In this rather grubby flick a policeman called Peter Strange (played by Michael York) falls for an underage girl (played by Susan George), finds himself compromised by a pair of pornographers and gets lured into an errand for a smack gang. This music has all the classic Kirchin mid-period sonic hallmarks that have always set him apart.