Mitch & Mitch || EC1 – City of Culture

There are plenty of stories trying to cover the Mitch & Mitch phenomenon. Most of them include keywords like: Tom Jobim, mustache, black metal/afrobeat, covers, country & eastern, chicken, Zelig Rabitchnyak, barber, 5-piece duo, 9-piece duo, Half-Mitch Half-Ape, Half-Ape Half-Mitch, Potato Republic (?), newjazz, Vibr-O-Matic (TM) and more. It would be great to be able to clear it all up, but after 10 years of being Mitchez we’re totally lost.

But wait, maybe it all does make sense?

Let’s see. We started the band not thinking about starting the band, but wanting to record a cover of “Desafinado”. Serious Mitch once had a mustache (he hated it, although we thought he looked charming), and yes, we tried to fuse black metal with afrobeat once (with unsatisfactory results). We’ve recorded an album with covers, entitled “12 Catchy Tunes (We Wish We Had Composed)”, which included some obscure tunes by our masters, and it was just 3 years after we released our country & eastern debut “Luv Yer Country”. Mr. Bitch (at the time known as Mrs. Mitch) used to bring her/his rubber chicken to the shows, untill it got stolen. OK… Zelig Rabitchnyak was such a fascinating composer, that we even worked (together with Igor Krutogolov and the folks from Kruzenshtern i Parohod) on a whole album of his music. Yeah… On the DVD we’ve released (entitled “Blackmail/Extortion”) there is quite a fucked up version of our own piece called “Barber’s Got TV”, and even though we used to play the shows as a 5-piece duo, since 2008 we’ve rarely done so, choosing instead a better, 9-piece option. And we even expand it to 10-piece sometimes (usually to perform the soundtrack we did for the 1925 silent film “The Lost World”) with Half-Mitch Half-Ape or Half-Ape Half-Mitch on piano, depending on which one is available. This Potato Republic thing we don’t dig. What was that about? Anyway some people started to call what we do “newjazz”, probably due to the heavy usage of a brass section and the instrument called Vibr-O-Matic (TM). These things ended up defining the sound of our latest album “XXII Century Sound Pioneers”. And more? Yeah, there is some more, but after 10 years of being Mitchez, we’re totally lost.

Concert will take place at EC1 – City of Culture

Registration mandatory