Music for TV Dinners
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Our Price: $228.56 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: Music CD See more new music releases 
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Canadian Music Store
Free Music Notes for Music for TV Dinners
Free Music Review: So that's what it's called.
Hit: 4 Stars
What a knockout collection of all the snippets of music that you never seem to hear all the way through or know anything about. Here is some of the most popular production music produced from 1950 to 1980. Most of the tracks come from England but three are from continental Europe (Curley Shirley, Speaking Guitar and Toys for the Boys) with the orchestration just a bit more quirky and strident than English library music. Unfortunately the notes give very little information about the arrangers and orchestras. All of the tracks are beautifully performed and recorded, as one would expect from music that was produced to be sold over and over again in the commercial arena. I always found it annoying that a lot of production music is not available to the public so I was very pleased to get this CD. If you are a fan of this musical genre click over to Amazon UK and look out for the `Test Card Music' series on Apollo Records (or checkout their website) they are up to volume eight so far. Each CD has sixty minutes plus and this brings me to why I only gave `Music for TV Dinners' four stars, I would have expected a lot more than the thirty-four minutes it contains, after all there is plenty of production music available. The second volume (almost thirty-five minutes) would easily have fitted on this disc making it real value for money.
Free Music Review: SONIC EQUIVALENT OF KLEENEX, AND EVERY BIT AS USEFUL!
Hit: 4 Stars
Do you know what "production music" is? It's disposable music (hence my allusion to Kleenex,) composed by lesser-known musicians, sort of like the indy MP3-download bands in our times. It is sold by the yard for use (and reuse after reuse) in TV shows, advertisements, industrial films etc. You wouldn't expect a Ninth Symphony from this genre, at least by its definition, but this compilation of "TV Dinners" is fabulous! Every number is perfectly, splendidly evocative of memories that may not even be our own. If you buy the notion that we have a collective unconscious, this is what our collective unconscious whistles when it's the late night show.
Come to think of it, although the title says "TV Dinners", I use it as background music for studying, sleeping, doing laundry...it is a bit more psychedelic and thus interesting than jazz for instance, which is just another musical doctrine.
Open your mind, and give it a try. Especially if you like lounge music in general (K&D, Thievery, etc.)
Free Music Review: Wrap my World in Foil and Heat It Up
Hit: 4 Stars
Music for TV Dinners is a compilation of music composed by artists working for KPM, a British firm that developed a niche for providing music scores for commercial and industrial films during the 1950's and 1960's. I purchased this CD so I could liven up my home videos by adding some campy music tracks to them. The CD is great and while you may not be able to listen to the disk in a single sitting, listening to a few tracks at a time can immediately transport you back to childhood days and the scratchy 1950's/1960's era educational films they were still showing in my grade school when I was growing up in the 1970's. After loading this disk on to my I-pod, I discovered it adds a certain surreal quality to my morning commute- nothing quite like walking through the streets of a large American city in the middle of a morning rush hour while listening to "Happy Go Lively". It's a hoot.Free Music Review: Very good...and so nostalgic!
Hit: 4 Stars
People who grew up with these songs will find this CD incredibly nostalgic. Who can forget "Sleepy Shores" and its wonderful piano solo, or "In the Limelight", so uplifting. This is instrumental music from the 50's and 60's that was written for TV commercials and sitcoms. Once you listen to it, you become attached to it and you never want to let go. It is not for everyone, but if you want to remember and smile, buy this CD.Free Music Review: Entertainingly dated corporate music (3.5 stars)
Hit: 3 Stars
You gotta love an album where every song sounds like "Ren & Stimpy" music. One word comes to mind when listening to this music - industry. This music was prepackaged by industries for industries. It was most likely used in (but not limited to) commercials and early educational films (the really campy ones). Viewed today, this music is an entertaining slice of camp. Its so surrealistically dated, you can't help but love it. It conjures up images of middle class Americans sitting around the dinner table enjoying perfect food - you know, the "Leave It to Beaver"-style 50s that never existed. There isn't music like this anymore quite frankly. Even though they weren't made to have artistic merit, they are incredibly unique. Hey - hip hop producers, this stuff is great for sampiling (I've used it in my wanky audio collage work before).