I know I keep going back to this artist, but there is a reason. He has an amazing grip on Nerd sensibilities, and a control of word usage that is nothing short of amazing. This time we have only two tracks: Critical Hit and Pitch Dark, both Game-centric and at the core of how we evolved into our current reality.
Sadly not with a robot backup band, and I am sorry to report there are no North American dates as yet, but Babymetal is setting up its first World Tour. The announced stops include Paris, Cologne, London, and Chiba City, and they are currently negotiating more concerts, so we could still get to see them here. Thanks to Crunchyroll for the heads up on this one, who got the word from J-Pop Idols, who heard about it from Natalie.
Here is an interesting Battle of the Robot Bands video put together by the Cyborg News Channel on You Tube. The bands they chose for the report were Germany’s Compressorhead, mentioned earlier on this blog, and Japan’s Z Machine, a University of Tokyo project sponsored by Zima.
KMel Robotics has an airborne video recording service as one of the uses for its quadrotor drones, and apparently to showcase that function they programed some of their drones to play the music being recorded. They also had to create some special instruments the drones could play, mostly by modifying existing devices. In this video they play three tunes, Thus Spake Zarathustra (2001 theme), Carroll of the Bells, and the national anthem. They have to have recorded the sound the drone motors and fans make and be electronically subtracting it from the audio track in order to make the music clear, which makes me wonder if they chose the instruments because they were not on the same frequencies as those noises. Thanks to I Programmer for the heads up on this one.
Robots haven’t been the stuff of science fiction as much as part of everyday life for years now, although Almost Human is a favorite show of mine, and still enough in the future to be sci-fi. How mainstream are robots getting? Recently President Obama exchanged bows with a Japanese Robot named ASIMO (just one letter short of Asimov, the sci-fi writer who invented the 3 Laws of Robotics), I think being acknowledged by a head of state counts as mainstream. Pretty much in that same number of days ago, sci-fi author John Scalzi tweeted about how he would like to see Babymetal, a three girl Idol group who sing sweet harmonies with a heavy metal band, tour with Compressorhead as their band. And yes, surprise, Compressorhead is a bunch of robots! I admit, I would pay money to see that show. Who is your favorite robot band?
This band continues to amaze me; here are a few more tracks I hope you will find as wonderful as I did. The first song is their Christmas selection CROSS THE SKY, the second is called METEOR, the third is FUTURE. And these are only a few out of the last 7 years; there are so many more that will make you smile to yourself and want still another song.