It is more Captain Robert, of course, than the band as a whole, but the first several chapters of The Wrath Of Fate are available to purchase, or to listen to online if you need a taste before making your decision. This is the fictionalized story of the origin of Abney Park, a kick-ass Steampunk band, and personally I love the way it is evolving so far. Just in case you didn’t know what kind of music a Steampunk Band plays, the second video shows them practicing one of their better songs, Airship Pirates, although the audio with it is from the studio version. This is the music you would have been listening to when the semaphores or telegraph finished sending the digitally processed signals, and Babbage’s Difference Engine used an array of tuned saw blades struck by hammers to play it back out to you. In those days, we would have been called clackers rather than hackers because of the sounds the steam-driven brass logic switches would have made while they ran our calculations, algorithms, and apps.
And a couple of pictures taken in London a few months ago; the first is a picture I took while staring at the actual, completed Babbage Engine (Babbage never finished building the full sized one himself, although he did have a bunch of smaller versions that allowed Ada to develop the worlds first programing language). I tried my best not to drool all over the case, but I may have failed in that particular.
The second was a picture taken of me and the Babbage machine by my traveling companion, proving I was there with it. I know that in this era of photoshoping anything and everything this does not constitute proof in most peoples minds. Since I have the added data point of having been there and remembering the moment the photo was taken, I could really care less if you believe it; for me, this is the photo that locks it down in my memory.
Finally, a bit of Captain Robert’s own attitude, as distributed by G4, about what Steampunk really is…