The Nude Remix competition has been over for about a month now, but I haven’t made a big deal about it. Quite frankly, there are better ways of spending my carbon than giving public recognition to some aspiring DJ living in his mother’s basement. 

But then I saw this video and, for the fourteenth time in my life, something cheered me up.


Now, the music doesn’t sound especially pleasant, it’s true. Those first thirty seconds, when it’s nothing but an atonal whine, is as bad as the new Coldplay album. This video makes me happy because machines are finally making music without any help from their fleshy operators.

Most people don’t know this, but in the days when I was a young, droopy-eyed lad prone to bouts of severe melancholy, I had no dreams of becoming the frontman for the biggest, most critically acclaimed rock band in the world. No, I wanted to be a scientist. More specifically, I wanted to build robots—not evil robots like Terminator or Mecha Godzilla, but friendly robots like R2D2 and C3PO, KITT in Knight Rider, and especially the robot in Lost in Space. 


That’s what I wanted: a machine who would understand my pain, who could make me laugh and beat up the other kids when they made fun of my eye. Alas, all robots could do at that time was manufacture cars, which didn’t help me (or the rapidly-decaying ozone layer) at all.

It’s too late to help my adolescent self, but I feel like progress is at last being made in the field of robotics. It may be true that the Industrial Revolution has made humanity more like machines, but now we’re finally making machines more like humanity. If robots can make music, it won’t be long before they are telling jokes, creating art, and yelling at each other on cable news networks.

I’m in a good mood just thinking about this, so I’ll leave you with a music video from my new favorite band. They don’t have a name, but they’re thinking about 100101011010101, which I think sounds pretentious, but here they are anyway. Enjoy!