Turing Machine - Robotronic

Robot barber artificial intelligence“Robotronic” is a humongous song, threatening, wild, and furious, but it starts off mostly quiet. The song comes together from disparate pieces, with a long intro that features a two-note guitar pulse, an intermittent second-guitar ping, and Jerry Fuchs’s seemingly random outbursts on the drums. I love songs like this, songs that seem like they’re building themselves from small, discrete components. Two minutes in, a distorted guitar line announces a change of form and Fuchs starts pounding out a more regular rhythm. And in the next minute, another transformation: topology as sound. Turing Machine, and especially on their first album, “A New Machine for Living,” are probably the only band I’ve heard who actually sound like math rock, like the band sat down and wrote their songs less from meandering jams or notation but from legitimate calculus. A lot of that has to do with Fuchs’s drumming, which is inventive and hyperkinetic (the kind of drumming that makes you want to air-drum no matter where you are, the kind of drumming that makes you think you could run forever or tear a phone book in half, etc.). There’s really nothing else like this album out there—18 years old and it still sounds fresh.[BUY A New Machine for Living]

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