Let's face it: rather than worrying about developing Artificial Intelligence, we should really be concerned with the state of so-called Real Intelligence. You don't need a "smart" washing machine; there are plenty of slack-jawed yokels at your local Wal-Mart who can handle the job nicely (and you won't have to pull CAT-5 cable into the utility room). If we allocate all of our menial tasks to useless members of society -- laid-off dotcommers, emo kids, genealogy nuts and so forth -- our hugely expensive, cutting-edge Artificial Intelligences will be able to apply themselves to an area where cold logic and heartless binary decision-making is a legitimate advantage: politics. Why not Vote Robot?
Consider the advantages of a robot leader. It'd be incapable of favoritism, corruption or prejudice. It would say only what it was told to say, and any ill-considered remarks could legitimately be blamed on poorly-written subroutines. It could be programmed with the languages and customs of every country on the planet, and an encyclopedic knowledge not only of everything it had said, but everything the press had said about it. If you told it to leave the interns alone, it really would, and we wouldn't have to worry about any drunken underage daughters either.
"Interesting idea," you're thinking. "But how does this relate to Vote Robot, the musical group, and their album In Meorm NA?" I'm glad you asked.
Vote Robot approaches electronic music like most middle-of-the-road political candidates approach running for office. They're a couple of old-fashioned guys at heart. You'll find no laptops, sequencers, drum machines or other cutting-edge tech toys in their musical arsenal; In Meorm NA works its magic with the fruits of a circa-1983 Radio Shack shopping spree. Turntables, tape loops, analog keyboards and mixing boards are their building blocks, and while the music occasionally suggests the pops, clicks and pings of contemporary glitchtronica, a cheery analog warmth pervades.
Despite the disruptive potential of needle-drops, shortwave burbling, resonant humming and the oblique interactions of plate-like slabs of synthesized texture, almost nothing here is jarring. "Nnpl Wry" and "Mtae Iroa" envelop you in their calming, womblike blur as static crackles, synapse-like, in the background. "Krkc Be H" sounds like a pop song playing on a car radio that's a few miles beyond the transmitter's broadcast range -- choppy and vague, it still presents a compelling melody. Other tracks send explorative data-tendrils across a black-and-white landscape, gamely seeking new and novel interaction. There's certainly no traditional structure here -- Vote Robot makes Oval sound radio-ready -- but in this particular case, lack of rigidity equals warmth.
The challenge, of course, is to find "songs" in such thematically vague material. In this case, machine-like thought patterns would be useful; after all, one waveform looks very much like another, and Vote Robot's rhythmic patterns are sometimes too loosely distributed for the human ear to perceive. If you dismiss acts like Pole and Squarepusher as "noise", you'll be hard-pressed to acknowledge Vote Robot as music. In Meorm NA lacks the excitement of rougher-edged, glitchier material, and may be boring to fence-sitting listeners.
Listen to In Meorm NA on a regular stereo system and you'll be pleasantly surprised by its warmth and simplicity. Play it on a surround-enabled system and you'll be stunned at its spatialization. The music folds itself around you like a blanket, flowing through three dimensional space, pulsing and breathing like a living thing. But be prepared for the disc's hidden track; it'll slightly more abrasive than the rest of the record, and might scare the crap out of you, particularly if the rest of the album has relaxed you.
If the world had a robot leader, the robot would be well advised to listen to Vote Robot; said automaton would come across as relaxed and traditional, capable of a hard-line response but inclined toward a friendlier approach. Musical selection could even function as an addendum to the Turing Test: when a machine chooses In Meorm NA over the latest Britney Spears CD, it clearly favors intelligence over artificiality.
