Audible, and frequently cited, influences in Mono's songs include jazzy instrumentation reminiscent of 1960s spy film soundtracks and production styles rooted in 1960s pop music.
Virgo, trained in classical piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, had been working as a session musician since the early 1990s as part of the production team of Nellee Hooper, which led to credits on a remix of Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy" (considered one of the landmark songs of trip hop's "Bristol sound") and Björk's 1993 album Debut.
[2][3] De Maré comes from a family with several generations of history in entertainment; her father was Tony Meehan, drummer for the Shadows,[4] her grandfather was one of the Gongmen featured in the opening logo sequences in Rank Organisation films,[3] and her grandmother was a dancer who worked with Shirley Bassey.
[5] The two were introduced to each other while in London in pursuit of their respective musical projects: Virgo was in the midst of a break in session work, while de Maré had been planning to set up a personal recording studio in Paris.
"; in particular, the presence of pieces by Anton Webern, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alban Berg, the principal members of the Second Viennese School,[16] supports Virgo's citation of the group (as well as their Klangfarbenmelodie technique)[3] as among his influences.
A score of remixers were commissioned on their four single releases; aside from the Propellerheads, the more notable of these include Stuart Price (in an early appearance as Les Rythmes Digitales), Mr. Scruff, Matthew Herbert, Jóhann Jóhannsson (under the alias Lhooq), and 187 Lockdown.
[29] In making comparisons to other popular artists of the late 1990s, Al Muzer, in Consumable Online, commends the band's music for being more sophisticated than chart-topping acts such as the Spice Girls and Hanson;[4] other reviewers, such as Spin's Jeff Salamon, take a more critical stance in noting the preponderance of bands with similar influences—period film scores and orchestrated pop, overlaid with beats—in the wake of Portishead, and criticize Mono for playing "by-the-numbers" in a combined review with Alpha's ComeFromHeaven, which is rated above Formica Blues for its more varied musical approaches.
[18] Still others felt that Mono stood out from this group (suggested as a "case of bad timing" by Melody Maker,[32] which nevertheless published a very favourable review of Formica Blues): those with this opinion, such as Chaos Digizine, tended to compare the band more to Saint Etienne, to illustrate their successful "weaving together musical elements of the past and present".
The London music newspaper Echoes summarizes: "John Barry, Juliette Gréco, Françoise Hardy... Astrud Gilberto... Jerry Goldsmith, Jane Birkin, Brigitte Bardot, Avengers, Simone, Albert...", concluding with references to period television, fashion, and the leading figures of existentialism.
[33] In this, the band found approval with critics who appreciated their faithfulness to the music of the era: Toronto's Eye Weekly said that "unlike many of their contemporaries, they have a reverence for properly constructed songs",[34] and similarly, Charles Taylor, in The Boston Phoenix, remarked that "What distinguishes the album from a shopping list of mid-'60s cool is the enormous affection de Maré and Virgo conjure up for the period they invoke.