Regular Blogarhythms have no-doubt witnessed my public declarations of love for robots, and by extension “robot music,” in this space on multiple occasions. As it happens, the month of July has been pretty good for robots, and robot music. Though I’d been wary of it since it went into production, that Transformers movie turned out to be pretty badass, despite director Michael Bay’s hackneyed attempts at “humor,” and the unfortunate recycling of a tired cinematic cliché that resulted in the premature death of the only “Black” member of the team. In addition to the badassery of those giant transforming robots destroying shit, shooting lasers, and wielding cyberswords on the big screen, the month of July saw a couple of album covers graced by the visage of a giant robot or two as well!
As if bearing the image of a killer robot wasn’t geektastic enough, veteran London-based production duo Hexstatic’s new Ninja Tune release is actually titled When Robots Go Bad. Stylistically, the music they and their handful of vocal collaborators present throughout the disc’s 50-minute running time is not all that dissimilar in form and function to that of another robot-themed Dance act, Daft Punk. Which isn’t to say that Hex are Daft Punk copy-cats, just that crunchy Electro-flavored tracks like “Tokyo Traffic,” “Prom Night Party,” “A Different Place,” “Subway,” “Lab Rat,” “Freak Me,” “Newton’s Cradle,” “New Waves,” and “Bust” wouldn’t sound out of place in the mix with Daft Punk (or even Kanye’s recent jack “Stronger”), Justice (seriously, go get their album), Chromeo (their’s too) or any number of current dancefloor darlings. Oh, and did I mention, the vocoder, or “robot voice,” features prominently on a couple of cuts? Sweet!
The only things Danish trio Badun have in common with Hexstatic is that they also make electronic music, and they also have a robot on the cover of their new self-titled album. But hey, that’s good enough for me! Although they use electronic instruments, and have a distinctly robotic sound, Badun describe themselves as an Electronic Jazz band, and to a large degree that’s precisely what they are. Even though they’re “electronic,” they’re certainly not “Electro,” and if they used conventional instruments rather than machines which produce an array of sine-waves, saw-tooths, blips, and bleeps, they’d easily be classified as a Funk or Jazz outfit. But their brand of funky Jazz is something else… Like how I’d imagine Pharrell and Chad’s beats would sound if they made a “Glitch-Hop” version of one of their N*E*R*D albums. Fans of Squarepusher, Prefuse73, Tortoise, and Skeletons and the Girl-Faced Boys should catch on to Badun pretty quick. But brave souls unafraid of approaching the familiar territory of Jazz and Funk instrumentation from a totally new direction will be rewarded too.
Sadly, neither these artists, nor any other dispensers of anything even remotely resembling “robot music,” were featured in Transformers. And if I can indulge in another little gripe; the music in the flick sucked. C’mon son, gimme a synthesizer, or a drum-machine, or at least gimme a new version of “The Touch” or something! Geez!
-El Keter