He’s Howard Robot and he’s My Robot Friend. He’s released his third album, the electro-folk-pop mash-up that is Soft Core and he has provided the A to our Q.
If I were to play just one of your songs to someone who hasn’t heard your music, which would it be and why?
Robot High School because it has a secret agenda. I can’t tell you what the secret agenda is though because then it wouldn’t be a secret anymore, and that’s no fun.
You are being sent to the moon. You’re allowed to take 1 album. What is it?
Astral Weeks by Van Morrison. It is my favourite album of all time. I never get tired of it. Plus its title is celestially themed and that is a bonus for the whole moon trip.
What was the last album you bought?
Memory Tapes “Seek Magic”. It is my album of the year so far.
Tell us an interesting fact.
We are all robots.
Tell us about a band or singer we might not have heard of who should be featured on Suitcase Orchestra.
Sleeping States’ “There the Open Spaces” is a few years old but magically interesting. Talk Talk’s “Spirit of Eden” is even older, but beautiful and strangely underappreciated.
What film would you be a character in?
Tron2
Recommend a book.
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It is a love it or leave it proposition though. If you aren’t enthralled after the first 100-200 pages, just walk away.
What’s the worst record in your collection?
It is an album called “Picking Up Girls Is Easy,” sort of a how-to record. It is delightfully terrible.
What question should I always ask in a Q & A? And answer it please.
Not this one. Really. It hurts my brain and sends it into a recursive loop. I have to shut down and reboot every time you ask it.
Soft Core by My Robot Friend is available now, check it out here.
Who wouldn’t want a robot friend? Who wouldn’t want to be a robot for that matter?
I would, and so would Howard Robot which is why he calls his solo music project My Robot Friend and why he performs (and lives?) in the cool home made electronic suit pictured here.
I had read somewhere that My Robot Friend’s third album, the recently released Soft Core sounded like The Pet Shop Boys. Breathe easily, it doesn’t. Not in the slightest. It is a bit difficult to pin point exactly what it does sound like though, being such a varied collage of songs.
It kicks off as you might expect an album made by someone called Howard Robot to. Robot High School bleeps and buzzes around a heavy synth sound and an effects laden vocal. Misfits Fight Song is a lighter more poppy version of the opener but then we’re off down some unusual avenues. The album features several collaborations. Dean Wareham contributes the skittering By Your Side and the outstanding Astronaut which has his trademark somnambulant wooziness and sounds not unlike Spacemen 3 at their most mellow. The Short Game, a collaboration with Zombie Nation, sounds like a lost New Order classic and Waiting appears twice – first as an 80’s electro dance track with Alison Moyet on vocals then reprised as a bluegrass folk song with Jay Kauffman on finger picking duties.
Sandwiched between all that are two songs, Boyfriend and the wryly observed Failure, which could easily be Jonathan Richman and Daniel Johnston songs, albeit performed as a duet with Metal Mickey in the case of Boyfriend.
This is a curious and ridiculously catchy mix of playfulness and sensitivity, classic pop and modern electronica. Hopefully by next Christmas, we’ll all be able to have our own My Robot Friend Suit to dance along in.
Visit My Robot Friend here.
