Robot Uprising
Feb 1, 2008 12:00 PM, David Weiss
LEMUR (League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots) performs at the Whitney Museum in NYC
Photo: Damien Neva
“I've always enjoyed being exposed to new things,” says a young lady standing nearby. On a damp November night on New York City's Upper East Side, she wouldn't be disappointed: LEMUR (League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, www.lemurbots.org) was putting on a show at the Whitney Museum that would definitely qualify as a new thing to the uninitiated.
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The philosophy of LEMUR, which was founded in 2000 by musician/engineer Eric Singer, is to build new sculptural musical instruments which incorporate robotic technology — not robots that play existing musical instruments. Hence inventions such as the electric stringed GuitarBot, !rBot (which plays a Peruvian goat-hoof rattle), the singing-bowl inspired TibetBot, the xylophone-like Ill-Tempered Clangier, the rattling ForestBot (featuring 10-foot rods that quiver and sway) and a series of percussive ModBots that look suspiciously like the underside of lunar landers.
The robots performed in a Composer's Showcase at the Whitney in collaboration with Foetus' musical adventurist JG Thirlwell, playing an entrancing set of new and recent pieces written specifically for LEMUR robots and string quartet. The often-arresting sounds veered from jagged and blurry soundscapes to cinematic orchestral techno, with the mechanical musicians playing often extreme parts that humans would be physically unable to pull off. As a result, the LEMUR initiative introduces new possibilities to the body of live experienced sound.
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