Thursday, November 28, 2019

Back To Muzak

I think the plan this season is to share out a new record each day, and then a new remaster as well.  I've been doing this sharity thing since 2005, and there are a lot of records that I shared out at the beginning that I need to revisit. Whether I have a cleaner new copy, or I can use my new software tricks to make it sound a little better, I want to go back to some of those old shares and do something a little better. And I'm going to start that for this year with this old share from year one, a great record from the fine folks at Muzak. People like to make fun of Muzak, and they've certainly been guilty of making a lot of really bad music over the years, but I'm a fan of their Christmas music, a few albums of which have been released over the years. This one actually came with the names of the musicians attached, a rarity in the world of Muzak. Please have a go at Muzak Christmas (Muzak AA 36, Stereo, 1980)!

1. Fanfare Orchestra-Hurry Home For Christmas
2. Jerry Laning-The Christmas Song
3. Philip Green-White Christmas
4. Jerry Laning-Winter Wonderland
5. Fanfare Orchestra-Christmas Is Coming (All Over The World)
6. Jerry Laning-Jingle Bell Rock
7. Chartsound Orchestra-Holly Time
8. Chartsound Orchestra-Merry Gentlemen
9. Chartsound Orchestra-Yuletide
10. Chartsound Orchestra-Christmas Morn
11. Chartsound Orchestra-Caroltime
12. Chartsound Orchestra-Three Kings

MEGA

5 comments:

  1. This looks interesting. Thanks for all your hard work, and I especially liked the Armed Forces series of holdiay records from last year.

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  2. I'm glad this came back. I usually hate Muzak, but do make exceptions with their Christmas records. I felt like their arrangers were given more freedoms with the holiday music, and din't have to create cheesy karaoke voiceless versions of hits and standards. Thank you.

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  3. i wonder if muzak, widely disparaged as “elevator music”, got a little of its own back with the cover design here. einstein had once proffered the image of an elevator in deep space as a way to view the true nature of gravity. he didn’t buy newton’s theory of an invisible rope that magically tugged masses together. instead, he said to imagine that you were floating inside an elevator in deep space and couldn’t look outside, and then suddenly your feet sank slowly toward the floor. with no observable reference point, you couldn’t tell if that was the result of entering the gravitation field of a large mass below or the result of a spaceship that had attached itself to the top outside and had begun accelerating the elevator further out into space.

    this puzzlement led to einstein’s novel idea that mass bent the space around it, sort of like the weight of a man on a loose trampoline bending the canvas. there’s no invisible rope a la newton. with einstein, we slide toward the center of the big mass because that’s the way mass has bent space. in fact, it does so to the point of verticality near the face of the earth. that’s why, when we step out the window of a tall building, we go vertically down down down. the science behind this became known as einstein’s general theory of relativity.

    couple all that with the star wars’ font and muzak is no longer geriatric kibble. rather, it’s the einsteinian future of music. take THAT all you blues brothers! a bit later this month, i hope to get into melachrino string theory.

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  4. I love this.. beyond this album and the Progression Number Three Christmas album are there any other Muzak Christmas albums floating around?! Could you reup the moog Christmas album?!

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  5. Amonarch87, yes, there is one more. I linked to it from my share of the Stimulus Progression Christmas album today.

    http://ernienotbert.blogspot.com/2019/11/back-to-muzak-2-continuance.html

    Those are the only three I know of. But there is a very good Seeburg one that will show up here in a new stereo rip in a couple of days. And then the 3M one from a couple years ago...

    If you're looking for the Christmas Becomes Electric, that one's been reissued and isn't the sort of thing I can share around here anymore. If there's money to be made from something, it's going to get reissued sooner or later. But no one is going to pay money for old Muzak demo albums. At least I don't think so...

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