Robot Musicians Wow Crowds At Live Concert

With digital production robotising sound anyway, what's to stop us delving into entirely mechanised performance? Naturally robot-mad Japan is at the forefront of this quest and has now staged an all-robot performance. Who needs humans hey? Get robots to perform, never a note out, never a dull moment as the world-weary touring artist reaches for the first dirnk he's had since yesterday's wild party, and musters a comment for the eager crowd, robots are guaranteed to deliver because they come with a price tag and someone made them. Arguably the same goes for famous musicians, yet somehow the robots can just do it better, and they're a new idea so they're more fun. 

For this landmark robot concert that you can see below, Japanese pop-music which is never any good anyway, is delivered true to style with robots and live singers collaborating, as the girls customarily impersonate prepubescants and the Terminator guitarist scratch over multiple fretboards and waggle their flashing TV heads.
And who can match them? Aptly named "Mach" the guitar player has 78 fingers and uses 12 picks! Drum robot Ashura can play 22 drums with his six arms. Just think for a minute. Is the future we've always imagined, the dystopia we've been endlessly portraying since the first world war in novels and films finally here, and we're just too numb to notice its dawning? For while a full-on flashing lights Muppet Show performance would have had a similar kind of impact on an audience, once the human hands were out of sight, there'd be no life in the puppets. But Z-Machines (named aptly after the apocalyptic World War Z zombie movie starring Brad Pitt?) run on power with circuitry that contain information. At this point in time the robots are mere slaves, doing as we tell them and turning off when we switch them off. But how far is dystopia now?
Aside from all the analysis, you might ask what kind of visual spectacle it is. Well, it's hilarious - Animal-meets-Terminator-meets-Transformers set beside a school-girl Xfactor special...

OtherCosmo, the keyboard "player", was designed by Yoichiro Kawaguchi, an artist and professor at Tokyo University. These are guest produced machines. Creator DJ Tasaka who's music the robot band is playing, says the three robots in Z-Machines have the ability to create sounds that are impossible for three human musicians to mimic. He has obviously not heard The Gossip live.
The advent of the band follows on from experiments last year with a four armed drummer who looks perfectly gross. But don't complain too loudly, or manufacturers will start encasing these better-than-human performers in silicon dolls and we'll get cosy, just as Stephen Spielberg imagined in the film A.I. where Jude Law played a synthetic sex doll on the run Gigolo Joe, a male prostitute Mecha programmed with the ability to mimic love. And now years after A.I, silicon sex dolls DO have different programmable personalities. Yes, Spielberg and Charlie Brooker are on the money. Roxxy, who we've linked to in the last sentence, can even pick up on your interests such as soccer, and will email you about them. What kind of a pitiful populace are we catering for? No one deserves to be so alone they need a doll for company. We should be investing in reaching out to the lonely masses not increasing their cocoon-like solitude with toys.
Meanwhile the Japanse Z-Machine band, who appear almost cuddly compared to Spicy Susie and the Barely 18 dolls created by Roxxy's creator, recently performed their debut concert at the Future Party event "Post People, Post Party". All composed by Tokyo-based DJ Tasaka. And "Post people" it really is.