I love robots. Anytime a music group decides to throw in the vocoder or talk box into a song, it ranks three points higher in my book. My favorite is when a rock band adds a robot to the band’s line-up. As robots have been synonymous with electronic music, nothing better when they jump genres. I think the best part about vocoders and talk boxes, is that it transforms a singers voice to something familiar, something we’ve heard before. It’s like I’ve had a favorite singer since the first time I heard Peter Frampton or Electric Light Orchestra, and they keep popping up to do guest appearances ever since.
So I’ve collected a dozen robot songs for the first volume of the Robot Round-up. Keep in mind that robots only speak in binary; hence their dozen is only 11 because they only have ones and zeros to work with.
Snowden – raymfer made me a mix cd for my drive up to Coachella. It was one of the most bad ass mixes I’d ever received, and track four was from a band called Snowden. The original versing of the song didn’t have robots, but La Castle Vania* made a good decision to add them to the chorus to create a song that is sure to get you out of your seat. Please put this one at full volume to garner the full effect.
Snowden – Black Eyes (La Castle Vania Remix)
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Snowden – Anti-Anti 
Does It Offend You, Yeah? – I heard this song on Indie 103.1 a few days ago. The beat immediately made me love the song, and then they brought in the robots – bravo!
Does It Offend You, Yeah? – We Are Rockstars
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Does It Offend You, Yeah? – You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into
Rafter – This guy is not only an amazing producer who works with Sufjan Stevens and the Fiery Furnaces, but he also makes his own quirky, yet awesome, music. It’s really worth checking out an album to hear all the genre-bending kick your slippers of and dance in the kitchen music. Oh, and he is on Asthmatic Kitty Records and doesn’t mind a robot dropping F-bombs in his songs.
Rafter – Long Ago A Rodent As Big As A Bull Lurked In South America
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Rafter – Sex Death Cassette
Justice – Justice may be the new Daft Punk, but they need to learn a lesson from their predecessor duo and add some more robots to their music. Here is a single selection from their Cross album in which they give the robots some love.
Justice – New Jack
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Justice – Cross
Black Eyed Peas – If you let Bridging The Gaps play a couple minutes after the Macy Gray riddled “Request Line” ended, you were treated with one of the boldest uses of robots in music. BEP uses a hype man on the song, that can best be described as what a blind person hears when they use a computer. Also of note, this album came out when BEP was still making good music, also known as when they only let Fergie sing “la la la la la.”
Black Eyed Peas – Secret Song (from Bridging the Gaps)
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Black Eyed Peas – Bridging the Gap
Will.I.Am – Yes, he managed to make the playlist with back to back songs. I think too many people slept on WIll.I.Am‘s solo album, but there were some really good songs on it. And as you can see from this one the production value is top notch. This is also the original song that Will decided to just use the same beat for Estelle‘s first single; I’ll never understand how producers get away with that.
Will.I.Am – Impatient
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Will.I.Am – Songs About Girls
The Apples in Stereo – This band came out with an album this year that is great, but it was last years album New Magnetic Wonder that put the band on the map in the robot community. The album is 24 tracks long and about half of them include anything from robot back-up vocals (as in the song I’m posting) to full on robot run songs. I really thought about posting a few songs just from this album for this list, but I think you should buy the album and experience the magic for yourself.
The Apples in Stereo – 7 Stars
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The Apples in Stereo – New Magnetic Wonder
Rivers Cuomo – For info on this track please see my previous post here: http://audiomuffin.com/the-rivers-ran-weezer/. But if you are too lazy to click the link, suffice to say in the annals of music history Weezer‘s second album was supposed to be a concept album involving space travel, multiple singers, and of course, a robot.
Rivers Cuomo – Blast Off!
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Rivers Cuomo – Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo
The Mountaineers – This band doesn’t exist anymore, but if you can get your hands on some of their music, expect a rocking robot of a good time.
The Mountaineers – Apart From This
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The Mountaineers – Messy Century
Schneider TM – What more can you ask for than a robot doing a Smiths cover with backing music that sounds like it was copy and pasted from a Dntel album?
Schneider TM – Light 3000
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Schneider TM – Binokular
Daft Punk – The best electronic album of all time is hands down Daft Punk’s Discovery. It not only packed the clubs with the dance tracks you expect from techno, but the French duo rounded things off with slow songs. A great album runs the gamit of human emotion, and nobody knows this better than Daft Punk; and they did it using robots.
Daft Punk – Something About Us
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Daft Punk – Discovery
* thanks Oliver
that smith’s cover is f-ing awesome. nice work.
I love love love this site, with the pretty pink and blue graphics and the kick ass songs.
*shakes hand*
kudos to the robot blog too!
awesome post!!! these songs do some serious justice to robots around the world.
how does it feel? you just got bookmarked!!!
that snowden remix is by le castle vania, not la riots. http://www.myspace.com/castlevaniadisco. great song.
nice idea for a list. there were only a couple of good songs on will.i.am’s album, and “Impatient” wasn’t one of them. the reason he can get away with recycling the beat is that he actually turned it into a good song for Estelle. we are accepting of redemption.
sweet robot mix! I think the Flight of the Conchords’ “Robots” could of almost made the list!
Noice post! some of my all time favorites are in this one, and I think I may have made a couple new ones
Thanks guys.
In the track newjack theres no robot noises in there at all its an 80′s song called you make me want to wiggle or something like that by the brothers johnso apart from that nice!!! love the site
I guess you’re right Tom. Still sounds like robots to me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1FAh-RCsBk
I’ve been meaning to make some kind of vocoder/talk box megamix for myself for a while now. I’m glad to see I’m not alone in my love for robot vocals. But no Chromeo? No Zapp and Roger?!?!? I suppose this is Vol. 1… nice work man!
c572t
I am with a band, Recorder. We use a vocoder in all of our vocals. We blend humanity into our robot lullabies. I am the female of the group and I see a striking resemblance to the lovely aluminum lady on the forefront of this blog
Recorder
Cylob’s is another robotic jammy-jam to add to your list. It’s the song that had me first searching the web for “vocoder”.
I cant find the rafter song. Anyone know how?
I want to listen good music. Help me please.
I want to listen good music!
sir,i am looking for the songs below,for a long time,which i listened in 1989.
one song’s start was like-sunrise,sunrise( i don’t know exact words) 1 2 3 hey,dida dida and then the music starts.
in that same album,there was a great accident and glass breaking music,at one of the song’s end.
all music was with robotic voices and vocoder voices like- o o o o ooo aah ooh.
could you tell me,about those songs and artists.
These terrible days, all the links are roads to nowhere….
@Babanarama – Yeah, about a year and a half ago our old hosting company took down all our mp3s. So anything older than that will have missing files. Sorry about that. I’ll write a new robot article very soon just for you!