With Piehead's 10th installment this year, the label offers up apleasant slice of lo-fi electro in the form of the Nippon-o-centricalbum from Robokoneko (or Robot Cat for the gaijin.) The record beginswith a sample from 2010wherein the professor and the machine are wondering if computers dream.From that simple sample, the rest of the agenda for Robokoneko is laidout.The record is comprised of four tracks of melodic, blippy electrothat tends to worship at the altar of artificial intelligence andsci-fi references, and four remixes that take other Robokoneko tracksin different, but not too-different directions. There's a loveble lackof fidelity in the recording, where tape hiss is better disregarded andsample noise isn't smoothly eased into but rather accepted as aby-product of the approach of cut and paste. "Nevermore" is builtaround a simple electric piano melody and reprogrammed breaks while"Karataka" plays with game sounds and could be the soundtrack to a SegaGenesis cut screen in another life. The remixes all keep what must beRobokoneko's sense of melody in tact (to be honest, I haven't heard anyof the original songs and they aren't included here), and they all pickup on the gamey, glitchy mode from "Karataka" and weave that in and outof everything from straight-forward electro to minimalist cut-ups. Ifanything, the remixers seem to take the Robokoneko material moreseriously than the artist herself, and while they sound like they couldco-exist more freely in a world of similar sounding tracks, I preferthe original tunes here for their willingness not to care. This is thekind of record that winds up essentially genreless because it breaksthe stoic rules of DJs and world-renowned producers who like theirelectronic beats clean and well-polished, or at least dirty in amanufactured way. This is dirty, scrappy, fun electronica that workswell in a world of anime-fetish and casio love. It never stoops tobeing a novelty, and for that I admire it. samples:
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