RCRD LBL

Music For Robots' RCRD LBL

Posted 6/19/2008 10:27 AM by rcrd lbl

Tags: guest blogger, music for robots

Welcome to the fourth edition of our new guest-blogging feature "[Insert Name Of Site We Love Here]'s RCRD LBL". Basically, we love to tip our hats to the folks posting great tracks day in and day out and chat with them about their sites and what makes them tick, or blog, as the case maybe be. Also included in every feature will be a hand picked list of their favorite artists and songs from both RCRD LBL and their own site. 

Needless to say, we are very psyched on this and we hope you are too.

Bringing you the goods this week is one of our personal favorites, Music For Robots.  These guys have been in the game for a minute and have some very deep MP3 crates containing lots of dance, indie pop and general weirdness/awesomenes/robot-ness.  Enjoy!

Please tell us a bit more about your site. When you started it, what your editorial mission is, what you think makes it unique, etc, etc.

Music For Robots started 4 years ago when myself and my friends from college (J.P. Connolly, Mark Willett, David Brusie, Anders Pearson, Jon Cresswell, as well as Mark's brother Dave, and our friend Saleem Reshamwala) all scattered across the country, and we decided we needed a way to keep in touch with each other, and to keep pace with the music we were all listening to.

It was really just a little semi-private blog to start with, but we started seeking out bands and labels so that we could get permission to let people download tracks from us. We quickly went from a handful of link-backs and daily hits in the dozens, to being linked-to on the few other blogs around at the time, and started seeing daily hits in the hundreds.

Our "big break" came when we were approached to post music from a major label and the New York Times wrote about it (and some subsequent strangeness with said major label's promotion team). From there we started to see daily hits in the thousands (with stretches of tens-of-thousands), and we decided it was a good time to start promoting shows and dance parties, and to make a physical product, the Music For Robots Vol. 1 CD (which got us in the Times again) and about a year later, MFR Vol. 2, and couple of limited run t-shirt designs, including one by our friend Lovefoxx of CSS.

Basically, we decided we'd found a format: semi-daily blog posts about the bands we love - and have stuck to it, popularity and other blogging trends be damned.

Also, MFR isn't a 'real job' for any of us. We all do other things: for example, Brusie (Minneapolis) writes for a number of Twin Cities publications and is a contributor for Tiny Mix Tapes, Anders works for a prestigious NYC university, Mark is in music licensing in scenic Pasedena, CA, and I (robot Blair) am an IT nerd at a school and a part-time DJ.

How have you seen the music blog world change/shift over the past few years?

As Ice-T on an episode of Law and Order once said, "[we] were through with it before you knew what to do with it" Ha!

When we started there were only a handful of others before us, like Fluxblog and Said The Gramophone. We went from one of a handful to one of thousands, so it has alllllll changed. But as I said before, we still do what we like, write about who we want to, and we'll keep on doing it for as long as we feel like.

The biggest change comes on the promotional side. It went from cold-calling labels for permission to post tracks to today, where we quite literally sit buried underneath stacks and stacks of promo CDs and inundated with press releases.

What is your process for discovering music like? Or to put it another way, where do you find all the great stuff you post (without giving away too many secrets!)?

We get tons of submissions, via every promotion company out there, plus cold-call style emails, and myspace, but a lot of it isn't very good - that said, we do try hard to actually listen to the things we get sent and give bands a shot. That has paid off, since we do end up with some stuff people wouldn't hear about otherwise.

At the same time, myself and the other robots do all go to shows, and go out to clubs and stuff, so we try to keep looking for things on our own. It helps that we've all got fairly different taste in music, so there's always something different that we'll find interesting.

What are your future plans for the site?

More more more more!  We'll keep it up, and keep trying to find and write about music that we think people need to hear. Expect more projects from us, even more physical product on occasion.

And since I (Robot Blair) am a DJ as well (see 'People Don't Dance No More' with my buddy David Bruno - myspace.com/peopldontdancenomorenyc ), I'll keep on playing out in NYC and other places too!

Music For Robots' RCRD LBL

Fenin - A Try

Shitkatapult is such a crazy label - their hard club stuff is too much for me, but when they throw stuff at you like Apparat, or Fenin, its a real surprise. The Fenin record is good all the way through, and this broken-beat-y dub-reggae track is straight dope!

Bon Iver - Skinny Love

Jeeeez, this album is gorgeous. Robot Mark wrote about him ages back, and I'm really glad the new record turned out to be so good.

The Mae Shi - I Get (Almost) Anything I Want

They're a local Los Angeles favorite and one that MFR has also been championing since their beginning. A perfect song as both a finish and a start.

No Age - Eraser

Another LA staple, having now found a small national audience thanks to help from folks like RCRD LBL.  This record is as sprawling and gorgeous as the city in which it was written.

Phosphorescent - A Picture of Our Torn Up Praise

The lead single off Matthew Houck's breakthough artistic statement. We all knew he had it in him, so it was so great to hear him finally deliver it.

Thao - Beat (Health, Life And Fire)

Thao's full name is Thao Nguyen, and she plays with this band called The Get Down Stay Down. Their album We Brave Be Stings And All (Kill Rock Stars) is really fantastic. She's got crazy energy and a great voice, and she sure knows how to write a song.

Music For Robots' Favorite Tracks

Runaway - Mix 19

Thanks to my NYC DJ connections, I met these guys about a year and a half ago, and have been keeping up with them regularly. They've got a crazy new single ("Brooklyn Club Jam") coming out soon on DFA/Rekids that will definitely be a summer jam.

El Ten Eleven - Connie

One of my all-time favorite tracks from one of my all-time favorite bands. This was an earlier one for us, coming in December of 2005. Feels even longer ago.

Love - Everybody's Gotta Live

An amazing song and one of the first times that people wrote to me commenting more about the writing than
the song. (Blair: and I got into playing this out in DJ gigs right around the end of the night)

Walter Meego - One Five

In my write-up I talked mostly about the heat of southern California, and now the Meego boys live in the
Valley. It's a nice coincidence, and it's great to see how far this band has come since their first mention here.

Mouthful of Bees - The Now

I (David) posted this track in November 2006, and I still listen to it all the time. This Minneapolis band is one of the best to emerge in years. They juggle garage rock and pop like it's easy, and all their songs sound simultaneously well-rehearsed and tossed off. This song, from their awesome record The End, is recommended for anytime you need a good kick in the ass.

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