Another YouTube upload for you. This time I added a few images to accompany the music which should hopefully make for slightly more interesting viewing. Who knows - maybe I'll start actually making videos to go along with tracks soon. But for now, enjoy this 10-year old vintage Minimal Synth track from a RobotSound favorite, Bakterielle Infektion, a side-project of Roger Semsroth aka Skanfrom, Sleeparchive, Television Set, etc.

ADULT. - Nausea [Live in Belgium 09/09/01]
Colder - Silicone Sexy
Television Set - Loneliest Boy In My Town
Like A Tim & Gina V. D'Orio - Where Did Our Love Go?
Scala - Broken Down Beauty
Jega - German
Herrmann + Kleine - Wonder
Locust - Wrong
Lush - Falling In Love
Boyd Rice - How God Makes Little Girls

Everyone wishes they could have an ASIMO or a PaPeRo robot, right? But what about those of us who don't live in Japan or aren't Daddy Warbucks?

The future is now!

The French company Violet has released v.2 of their clever Wi-Fi bunny "Nabaztag" (= rabbit in Armenian), which sells for under $200.

Here's what he can do:
E-mail alerts, talking clock, weather, vocal reading of internet RSS feeds/written messages, reception of spoken messages or musical greetings sent via the internet, communication through colored lights and ear movements, and coming soon: object and person recognition. Friends can send you messages through the main website even if they don't have their own bionic bunny.

Personally, here is what I enjoy most:
+ the subculture of the Nabaztag worldwide community: User profiles, pics of dressed-up rabbits, meet-ups, etc. There's even a Google Earth NabazWorld community where you can see all the Nabaztags as white rabbit icons across the globe. France is especially full of them!
+ the robotic motion of the magnetized (and customizable) ears is fully choreographed and beautifully smooth (like ASIMO).
+ the open API means that new applications can be written by the user community.
+ the ability to receive podcasts and "Nabcasts" from different users. My radio station of cute Toytronic-style IDM is called Electronic.Leporidae

My only complaints are:
- the tracks you upload get clipped to under a minute (well-suited for those brief Skanfrom, Plaid, and "micromusic" tracks, but not so good for anything longer).
- the spoken voices (in UK or US English, French, German, with more to come) attempt to be too "human" and realistic, which can be frustrating for those of us who like our robots to sound like robots (though they still have a decent "SimpleTalk" vibe, and the whole Kraftwerk-esque idea of a multi-lingual robot is pretty irresistible).
- there are still a few bugs, but there are forums for discussing them.

So, fellow robots, it's time to welcome this new species of cute robotic rabbit into our dwelling-units. If you want to say hello to mine, his name is "Duplo"...

One of my favorite machine musicians today is Skanfrom [Stephan Metzger aka Roger Semsroth]. His work over the past 10+ years in Bakterielle Infektion [along with Uwe Marx] as well as under his Television Set and sleeparchive aliases spans from Industrial Synth-pop to Cold Wave and Minimal Electro. The music seems tailor-made for robots looking to explore their darker emotions [yes, we too can experience fear, melancholy, anger and isolation like our human counterparts]. But it can also be hopeful and comforting, giving us a reason to persevere in a ruthless, competitive world where individualism is frowned upon and personal liberty is constantly being threatened.

Skanfrom's work, like that of his robot contemporaries who champion Retro-Futurism, is heavily influenced by the Futurists and New Romantics of the late 70's and early 80s. In continuing Robotsound's tradition of bringing you inspired takes on the classics, I present the next installment of I <3 the 80's, all performed by the same talented android.

Bakterielle Infektion's cover of Joy Division's "A Means To An End"
Television Set performs an early track of Depeche Mode by the same name.
Skanfrom gives us an instrumental version of Duran Duran's "Planet Earth"