Z-Machines

I'd been thinking about writing the following for a few days now, but I kept holding back. The fear of upsetting the sensibilities of some particularly philanthropic and humanist reader, and thus of certainly disagreeing, did the rest. Then, the other day, on hearing the news of the death of Alan Myers, drummer for Devo from 1976 to 1986, I decided to write it anyway.

Myers was in fact, together with his bandmates, the architect of the famous philosophy of De-Evolution (from which the name Devo itself derives); for them, human civilization had reached its peak of evolution, and from that point onward, in the early Seventies, de-evolution began.

The Devo project was showcased extensively on stage, with an ingenious performance-spectacle that often drew on video art and cabaret, before it found an outlet on record. It was, as ever, the futurist Brian Eno who appreciated the power of their vision and produced, in 1978, “Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo“, a debut that gathered together the ideas developed over the previous four years. So here I am, intent on writing what follows. But I know, and I want to say it right away, that this is an idea only a minority of you will agree with – and perhaps only a minority of humankind in toto.

For a variety of anthropological reasons, I would have liked to be near Tokyo this past June 24th. But more out of a fascination à-la Oliver Sacks's “An Anthropologist on Mars” than à-la Nigel Barney's “The Young Anthropologist”, for those who enjoy this kind of reading. The main reason for this distinction is that I would gladly have attended the first concert by Z-Machines.

This wasn't, in fact, an ordinary concert like the dozens we're now used to seeing, but the first-ever concert by a band made up entirely of robots. Yes, because the Z-Machines lineup follows the classic rock band format, but what changes the game are the members of the group. The Z-Machines are not flesh-and-blood musicians, but three robots: Mach, who plays a kind of guitar, Ashura on percussion, and Cosmo handling the electronics. Nicknames aside – though if you think about it, we also have human beings who've decided to call themselves Count Grishnákh or Vanilla Ice without anyone batting an eyelid – judging by the screaming crowd in certain YouTube clips, the promised spectacle did indeed deliver. The songs were chosen by fans through the official Z-Machines website, and, from what we've been able to hear, they may be a bit gaudy and still rough around the edges, but they'd certainly hold their own in the Other Sounds section.

Granted, perhaps the audience itself would deserve a ten-page article, but I know people of unquestionable musical expertise who have publicly admitted to being drawn “even to a C1-P8 sitting on the couch that every now and then sings me a few verses of Lemmy“. For those few of you who don't know, C1-P8, or R2-D2, is the quintessential little robot from “Star Wars”.

But such thoughts aren't really all that strange; if we're honest with ourselves, many of us have pictured our own personal “music of the future”: the afascinados of the robotic-era Kraftwerk now number in the millions, figures like Leonard Theremin and Robert Moog have fried the brains of entire generations (it's no coincidence that the eponymous instruments they created are still in use today), and Björk and Radiohead have made a cult of the future a reason for living – at least artistically – both for themselves and their fans.

Now, there's one point worth making, and it's absolutely mind-boggling. Bearing in mind that I'm deliberately avoiding, out of good taste and humility, any discussion here of the experiments carried out by geniuses of the caliber of Pierre Schaeffer, Krzysztof Penderecki or, once again, John Cage, nor, in the more recent past, despite the (relatively) storied history of Sergi Jordà's Reactable, Toshio Iwai's Tenori-On, the sounds Pierre Bastien built from toy-construction pieces, and Guillermo Galindo's sophisticated electronic-totems – the ones actually playing have always, and only ever, been human beings – even if in some cases they play like dogs.

Sure, tinkering nerds occasionally try to build something, but rarely do they move beyond food containers turned into futuristic noise-makers, or vintage consoles converted into 8-bit instruments. In essence, we can still only picture some random pair of Daft Punk or Chemical Brothers members with one of these gadgets in their hands. And yet, back in March 1954, fifty-nine years ago, when imagining the future, Isaac Asimov envisioned a series of electronic devices emitting strange bzz/bzzzz and blup/blup sounds over beats played by alien machines. Nothing could be further from today's reality.

I know: many of you are probably wondering where I'm going with this, and some of you are already dreading the arrival of some hot take wishing for the end of the human race in favour of machines. Well, maybe not quite that. But we do feel like breaking a lance for Yoichiro Kawaguchi, the fearless father and artist-builder behind Z-Machines. Kawaguchi himself explains it better than a thousand words could: "Robot musicians do things humans can't do: they have arms of every length, they move in different ways, and they play more than one instrument at a time. Music on stage will evolve in the coming years, and there could be some fun new developments." It's hard not to believe him. Sure, a few years back Compressorhead popped up and found a few thousand fans around the world; but at most Sickboy, Fingers and Bones limited themselves to a handful of covers of Ramones, Pantera or Ac/Dc songs. Here we're on a decidedly different level, and personally a far more intriguing one. "I took part in this project because it let me create different, fun kinds of expression on stage: these aren't just machines that make music, this is a new kind of artistic expression," Kawaguchi tells us proudly.

Look, we too find the tra-pa-tum tra-pa-tum of Luca Ferrari of Verdena beautiful (especially the ones on "Spaceman", given the sci-fi theme at hand), but we feel no discomfort whatsoever in admitting that music, as we're experiencing it these days, is undoubtedly de-evolving. At times it even feels good to admit it every now and then. Liberating. Almost like a confession. So it occurs to us that, deep down, Avril Lavigne's voice is far less relevant than that of Robot Mach, who, if nothing else, is a marvel of engineering and isn't trying to pay for his Ferrari off the romantic misfortunes/joys of teenage girls the world over; and that a drummer like Ashura or Sickboy strikes us as far less irritating than certain progressive-metal drummers incapable (sometimes in every sense) of glimpsing any other form of life beyond Mike Portnoy's tutorials. So bring on the machines, which in many cases would do a better job and deliver a far more original product – finally allowing Avril Lavigne and company to find work suited to their actual expressive abilities, like miming or whatever else.

Ride the wave of great music

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