Robot Daydream : Solstis & Oddeeo

I've been doing a bit of digging on SoundCloud and have found a couple of robot themed songs to share. Here's one of them. I've spent several moments researching the artists Solstis & Oddeeo and there's not a lot of information about them; Oddeeo fiddles about with vocoder stuff (or whatever you kids call it these days), so I guess Solstis is responsible for the music. The track Robot Daydream is possibly inspired by Porter Robinson's Sad Machine, but it's the opening moments of Robot Daydream that remind me of a chilled house track from the early 90s and although it's obvious, I really can't put my finger on it. There's nowt worse than an ear-worm you can't put your finger on!




The best thing about streaming from soundcloud is (apart from the quality) the comments on the song's timeline... "dud i love those beats" says Mr Fox. Sick Souls yells "ROBOTS!" whilst Zillax mumbles "OK start i guess" beneath his breath.  Another poster claims it "Remembers me of FinalFantasy 13 :)" and others say stuff like 'brilliant', 'amazing', '<3', 'great music' and "Beat is sick! I love this terribly!" (what a jolly nice thing to say), but not as nice as copacetic7's remark "bee-yooo-teee-FULL" (adding four exclamation marks so the comment really hits home). I often despair at the grammar that some youngsters chose to use these days. A few commentators state that Robot Daydream reminds them of the aforementioned Sad Machine by Porter Robinson... but all remains civil until Zac009 trolls in and spoils the party by shouting "you dick,,, this is sad machine kick, synth, similar voice, drums, so fuck you fan boy" (I'd better add some exclamation marks on Zac009's behalf) !!!
All I can say to Zac009 is "Well see about that!"

The Robot Song : Nancy Kepner

Today's song about robots comes from the amorous, humorous & roboticus Nancy Kepner. Yes I know I still haven't posted any Kraftwerk or Flaming Lips, but there's plenty of time to post the robot songs everyone knows. For the time being, I'm going to continue rooting out the lesser known robot songs because it's a lot more fun and more often than not... they're better!

Whilst many robot songs tend to be a nightmare vision set in a dark future, Nancy gives us an altogether more positive scenario. Robots are not our enemies. They are not the destructor of civilisation. They are not a problem that needs solving... in fact they are the solution to all of our problems, as Nancy so eloquently explains...




According to a reliable source, robot beings will rule the world in the distant future, and I intend to appease our robot masters with my blog in their honour... so I'd better be careful what I say.
Hail Robots... (especially if they have a great big gigantic machine gun) ...your wish is my command!

What's that robot master? You want another robot song posting tomorrow? It shall be done... but I can't promise that it'll be better than The Robot Song by the wonderful and possibly inimitable Nancy Kepner.

Everyday Robots : Damon Albarn

When I started thinking about making a compilation titled 101 Songs About Robots, I could think of maybe ten or twelve robot themed songs that included Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by the Flaming Lips, Robot by Hawkwind, The Robots & Man Machine by Kraftwerk, Sy-Borg by Frank Zappa, a handful of songs from Mother Gong's Robot Woman trilogy, Goldie Lookin' Chain's rap-tastic Half Man, Half Machine and of course Black Sabbath's Iron Man.

Then after a lot of digging and searching on Soulseek the list grew to over 250 tracks, but once I'd whittled out the instrumentals (I, Robot - Alan Parsons), the tenuous (Electric Youth - Debbie Gibson) and the songs with a robotesque title but nothing in the lyrics to back it up (Bionic - Placebo)... my big list was quickly whittled down to about 60-70 songs about robots. I'd occasionally do a new search to try to unearth another song or two about robots and each search usually did unearth something... but I still felt I was a long way from my target of 101 'good' songs about robots.

After a couple of years in the doldrums and a catastrophic hard drive failure, the project was well and truly on the back burner. Then I heard Damon Albarn's beautiful and haunting Everyday Robots on the radio earlier this year and was inspired to reboot my search. I only expected to dig up another two or three tracks worthy of inclusion, when all of a sudden my list went from around 75-80 half decent songs about robots back to around the 200 mark in the space of a couple of days! Only this time the list was bang on topic with no instrumentals and nothing too tenuous.  This left me wondering how I was going to whittle the list down to 101 songs about robots as I now have more than enough, and searching the likes of Grooveshark the list is only getting larger.

That's when I decided to do a blog instead of a personal compilation. Not only does this give me an online archive in case I suffer another hard drive failure, but also means others can listen to the archive, rate each song and send me their own suggestions via the comments. I've no plans of stopping when I've posted 101 songs about robots as this is going to be a huge ever growing pulsating blog that rules from the centre of the roboverse!   "But what about the music!?" you may shout. Well, today it's the song that rekindled my love of robot songs: Damon Albarn's Everyday Robots... Mr Albarn, I thank you.