Cheesy Organ Delights

Swank.

August 7, 2014 at 5:01PM

If I embedded the file you wouldn't watch it. No one would. You'd look at the length and see "24 minutes? C'mon. Something under three minutes, if you please. This is the modern world and no one has time for that, as the saying goes." All right; how about this?

That is the swankest piece of music ever played on an organ. But electric organs are generally regarded as cheesy things, plinky-dinky kitsch machines that summed up everything horrible about middle-class taste. But their sound defined a decade and a half of popular music, if not more; they deserve respect.

They get it, right here. It's a BBC4 radio documentary on the rise and fall of the electric organ. It's a video, but it consists of a picture of the presenter, and his expression gets a bit unnerving after a few minutes, so just minimize the browser and listen. If nothing else you will meet the swingin' sounds of Karl Wunderlich.

Related: Matrix fight-scene sounds replaced with 8-bit game sounds. Wonderful.

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