Space-age retrofuturistic muzak
Who they?
The lounge lizard alter ego of New York library music obsessive Rich Bennett, whose new 11-minute album ‘Spacetronic Lunchbox’ is a collection of hilarious, bossa nova-infused, retrofuturist vignettes. Quite frankly – and no other word will suffice here – it’s groovy. “That genre creates its own secret world, with so many hidden things along the way to unlock,” says Bennett. “So you learn that Sven Libaek is an amazing Juilliard-trained composer, who also wrote all that groovy background music for ‘Scooby Doo’.” See? That word, again…
Why Roman Angelos?
“I was watching the dinner entertainment on an overnight ferry to Croatia,” explains Bennett. “There was an older gentleman playing a very shoddy, modern Casio keyboard, and he just seemed so tired and bored. Beaten down by life. I remember thinking, ‘What if this guy is secretly some amazing composer, but his whole life has been a series of mishaps that resulted in him never being recognised?’.” Thus, Roman Angelos was born.
Tell us more…
“It’s an imaginary 1950s sitcom, where they have a robot maid that the older son has an awkward crush on…” says Bennett of the hilarious ‘I’m In Love With The Family Robot’. Elsewhere, ‘Highway Chase’ evokes images of Don Johnson wrestling with the wheel of a careering Ferrari Daytona, and if you can hear ‘Please Hold The Elevator’ without imagining a soft-focus Cybill Shepherd striding purposefully into a lift filled with middle-aged executives nervously adjusting their ties, then you clearly haven’t watched as much vintage television as the composer of this gloriously daffy collection. Let’s say “groovy” one final time and be done with it.
‘Spacetronic Lunchbox’ is on Happy Robots
