Wednesday, June 26, 2013

There Goes My Second Post-Career Choice

Some first class Japanese weirdness here.

A three-piece robot rock band called Z-Machines has taken to the stage in Tokyo, Japan to perform with pop group Amoyamo.

Guitarist Mach, drummer Ashura, and keyboardist Cosmo are creations by Zima, a Japanese alcoholic beverage brand, as a part of a new advertising campaign.

The band performed their debut piece Monday, "Post People, Post Party," composed by Tokyo-based DJ Tasaka.

DJ Tasaka says he had a disco-electro type song in mind before seeing how technically sophisticated the robots were.

"So then I wrote a new song, a much more complicated piece thinking, take that," says DJ Tasaka, "but then they were able to play it."

DJ Tasaka says the three robots in Z-Machines have the ability to create sounds that are impossible for three human musicians to mimic.



Mach the guitar robot, for example, has 78 fingers using 12 picks and the drum robot Ashura plays 22 drums with six arms - many more than the average human.

Cosmo, the keyboard robot, was designed separately by Yoichiro Kawaguchi, an artist and professor at Tokyo University.

It's the only robot out of the three that does not have a physical mechanism of playing an instrument. Instead, it is electrically wired to the keyboard.

That's just cheating...

Wombat-socho at the Other McCain lists this in his all encompassing list of Rule 5 posts for the week, "Rule 5 Sunday: Taylor Swift, We Hardly Knew Ye."

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