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Mellodrama

BAFICI 2009
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Info
Year:

2008
Original Title:

Mellodrama
País:

Estados Unidos 
Director:

Dianna Dilworth
Color:

Color
Format:

Video: Betacam
Duration:

75 min
Cast:
  • Mikael Åkerfeldt, Rod Argent, David Biro
Production:
  • GUIÓN: Dianna Dilworth
  • MONTAJE: Trevor Smith
  • PRODUCCIÓN: Dianna Dilworth, Elizabeth Parks Kibbey

Synopsis

If you’re more than 35 and own a couple of Yes or King Crimson records, it would be enough to tell you that this is a documentary about the Mellotron. Sit back and enjoy.

To the rest: let’s see, kids! There was a time when keyboards weren’t digital and samplers and Pro Tools did not exist. The great rock keyboard players, like Rick Wakeman, played submerged in a mountain of machines that produced a buzzing by then considered futurist: the Minimoog, the Hammond organ, and also the Mellotron, whose keys started some tape loops that played all kinds of instruments. Of course, emulation soon became the characteristic sound, and, in the late 60s, every prog-rock band had one. Now it’s a collector’s item for youngsters who have a fetish for analogue sounds, like Mars Volta or Radiohead, who used it in a big part of OK Computer. But this film is not centered on the musicians (many appear, though) but on the instrument itself, a mechanical marvel imagined in a garage in California in the early 50s.