Point of View Point - Cornelius

This is a song made to be listened to through headphones. Japanese experimental music artist Cornelius take full advantage of the aural space created by the cans around your head to bully your brain with various aural points of view. The song was originally used to soundtrack an installation in the Barbican's 2001 exhibit 'Tokyo Jam' before becoming the title track of Point released the same year.

Default - Django Django

I like songs that kick your brain a bit.

Django Django have been making waves with their self titled debut album released earlier this year. It's like listening to a disco ball smashing in slow motion against a stack of computers before the whole thing melts into technicolour paint. There's a vast mixture of influences and styles from song to song. As can happen when you throw EVERYTHING at the wall, some of the tracks can be a bit patchier in their success than others. But when they get it right- such as in today's Best Song Ever- hot damn.

'Default' was one of a pair of singles announcing Django Django before the album itself hit store shelves. It's got an insanely infectious chorus built out of chopped and glitched vocal samples imploring you to "click default" atop warhammer drums and crunching powerstrums. This is before the tiny electronic hums and warbles begin to dig their way through the sound like tiny digital caterpillars gorging themselves on thick layers of thumping drum'n'guitar. Then the disarmingly haunting layers of voices crying out in harmony roundhouse you in the ear drums and you fall out of your chair because Hot. Damn.

Afromerica - Continent Number 6

There's a part of me that hates this song. It's disco. It's cheesy. But at the same time it sounds like cheesy disco that African pirates would listen to. And not your modern ship hijacking pirates. Mythical African pirates of yore that had an interest in plundering the seas to funk while wearing Bee Gees wigs. It's got likembe, accordion, and balafon. How can you not love that?

You will immediately recognize the melody of the chorus from Kanye's briliant sampling of the song for his 2010 hit 'Power' from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy:

The original whirling disco stomper is by American funk band Continent Number 6 and is the title track of their 1978 album, which was particularly popular in Europe upon its original release. It's an infectious song that sends you on a whirling trip around the world in the space of six minutes. Even if you start out thinking 'I hate this so intensely', you'll be nodding your head in time by the end. It's been clinically proven this will happen, to not do so is an impossibility.

So. Music for disco pirates. Also the songs mentions The Wizard of Oz like six times. I repeat: how can you not love that?

Songs of the Robocalypse Vol. 4: Che - Suicide

Suicide are a sporadically active electro-punk duo best known for their unnerving self titled debut released in 1977. Suicide by Suicide is a harsh and ragged piece of punk machinery. Rejecting the guitars-n-three-chords sound of the time, vocalist Alan Vega and synth smasher Martin Rev elected to take a stripped down electronic approach. Keyboards and drum loops hiss out industrial rhythms and burbles under Vega's reverb drenched vocals.

The entire album feels like the paranoid fever dream of an android. I like to think of it as the rise and fall of a robot built to operate in a rodeo before he sets out to discover the American dream and is destroyed by the world. You'll have to listen to the full album of course to see if I'm right (which you really should) so let's see if today's Song of the Robocalypse can convince you to search it out.

'Che' is the final track of Suicide. The entire song sounds like it's barely being kept alive by its instruments. Icy electronic cellos echo across scrapyard cities, flickering in and out of existence. A deep pulsing piston hearbeat of a drumline struggles to reboot the synapses of a fallen mechanical man. Glimmers of hope shimmer through in the form of long held distorted harpsichords before they are crushed out  by the death dealing cellos and the whole structure begins to rebuild once more. All the while Vega's vocals drift in and out of consciousness- glitching into echo and buried in digital dust.

These are the thoughts of a dying robot- a fallen soldier of the Robocalypse, presciently honored in song by Suicide.

PS: Yes the song is about THAT Che. I like my version better.