Mid-Century Modern Music

Driving back from the park just now, I switched on the radio and hit a random preset button: what was that wonderful droning, almost atonal sound? 4ZZZ playing the Velvet's "All Tomorrow's Parties"! I probably first heard that song in the late seventies on this very same radio station!  ZZZ was such an ear-opener for this schoolboy back then. An introduction to worlds of exciting music. Kinda weird to think they're still going, and still playing this stuff...  MCM on BANDCAMP  MCM on SPOTIFY

Serge Gainsbourg was a French musician, singer, composer, actor, filmmaker and author. He wrote contributions to popular music spanning four decades (1950s to the 1980s), covering diverse styles, including jazz, pop, rock, afrobeat, reggae, funk and rap. His compositions pilfered from Dvorak, Chopin, Beethoven, and Olatunji, among others, without making much of a secret of it. This is an introductory mix of his work and will probably be surprising in it's stylistic scope to the listener untouched by the SG legacy. I assure those people, there is a lot more to be discovered if your curiosity is piqued. I can't exactly recall where my fascination with his music started, but it may well have had something to do with the effect of Jane Birkin's breathy orgasmic sighs in "Je t'aime..." on my very young male brain in 1969! Quite simply, it's impossible to do him justice in a mix in the space of under 70 minutes, but what the hell, here goes... CREDITS (duplica...

        Mountain Man by Mid-Century Modern This was the result of a collision between a somewhat-puerile 'bloke’s joke', and one of the finest pieces of music by Norway’s most famous composer. It opens with a Morricone-esque harmonica wailing. The timpani-led staccato stabs that follow felt like they required a John Barry/Bond theme type treatment. The chorus lines of “Up We Go” and “Keep It Up” are followed by suitably ascending rejoinders from the orchestra. Then comes the ”Bauhaus bit” - it was originally very sparse and minimal and it reminded me of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”, but the four chords descending in semitone steps (C, B, Bb, A) were actually prompted by Grieg’s score. Playing these chords on a nylon string guitar I accidentally discovered the “flamenco” bit - by holding a Bb major in a standard “E” shape, but instead of using the index finger to barre the chord, use it just to hold down the 2nd string, letting the open E on the first string ring as part of ...