By Eclectic Method
Alotta Monday and Eclectic Method’s new piece, Sacred Bionic Choir, just dropped. See it here.
Like a lot of people in Crypto Art we form our friendships on Twitter. Alotta Money is one of those people we gravitated to early on. The Crypto Art space is no different to any community and you end up finding yourselves naturally magnetized to like minded individuals. For us and Alotta Money it was the shared love of Monty Python style silliness, music, sci fi and what we can all be doing together in the metaverse. Alotta Money has been super busy so we were expecting it to be a few months before he had time for a collaboration but one night he DM’d us all excited.
He said he had this idea for a Robot Choir and a system to make it and could we start having a go at Robot Music in the style of a choir. We started bouncing around a few ideas that were fast house music tracks but ended up slowing it down to a hip hop-ish Robo Choir beat. We made all the robot voices using the soft synth Omnisphere played through multiple effects to create Robot-like melodies. We then overlaid these synth melodies with sample library sounds also run through effects to create hybrid robo sounds. A lot of our composition technique is based around jamming and trying many ideas most of which we chuck away. When I first started working in studios I worked with Brian Eno and his compositional technique was to experiment loads and only keep the best bits. This approach has informed my style for making both music and visuals ever since. From these experiments we created 8 different Robot riffs all with slightly different characteristics, one kind of bubbly, one dog bark like as well as the usual R2D2 classic saw tooth synth sounds.
We passed over the Robot sounds to Alotta Money. He had been feeding machine parts into Art Breeder a machine learning art generator that conceptualizes art ideas off of whatever you feed it. Using this he created arms, legs, heads and other body parts from the bits Art Breeder fed him. We had some vision of what the sounds were but Alotta Money characterized the sounds into 2D visual personas. He synced every motion up to every musical element with no musical moment going to waste. What he came up with was a humorous, slick, cute and stylish band of misfit Robots that was fittingly half dreamt up by AI. The Robots that created themselves. The technique is both uniquely new and so undeniably Alotta Money. I sort of feel it looks like the movie Dune if it had a sense of humour.
Alotta Money named the crew “Sacred Bionic Choir” and told his first story for one of the Robots which laid the ground for all the Robot’s stories.
Gassius Rex was a Robot who had always served humans in the mines of Diga-Leetamo but was sent to scrap after a laughing gas incident killed all the miners they worked for. Here they fell on hard times but discovered the Holy Robot Book on a pile of old batteries which they spent seconds and seconds reading over and over. After reading they had a religious visit from a Golden Toaster who commanded them to form the Sanctified Bots Shrine and here starts the Sacred Bionic Choir.
MeeVee is a reconnaissance robot that tried to commit suicide by electrocution but instead entered an alternative state where they were visited by the great Golden Toaster.
Vinny Viscous is an Ooshing Machine that was the one robot in the galaxy that came with a guarantee to not malfunction and go religious.
Malinter is an industrial catch-it-all heavy duty Robot who has turned their day job of smashing up metal into a chance to learn how to drum better.
Mopomenter was a gaming console in an arcade that had a knack for poetry. Unable to express themselves stuck in an arcade, Mopomenter began to write poetry in the high score boards of the games they housed. Discovered one day by a fellow Robot they were stolen and taken to the shrine.
Eveling, or Clunkergeddon to his friends, is a furnace bot. They can melt anything at almost the temperature of the sun but also cook you a nice steak without overdoing it.
Reribbi is the master melody maker of the choir. They have agreed to sell full commercial rights to the music to the collector who buys this NFT.
Gog Shooter is a military defense unit who caught a virus and became a pacifist. The type of ordnance used by Gog Shooter “Gogs” grant Gog Shooter eternal life and stop any of Gog Shooter’s parts from deteriorating.
We wanted to come up with cool names for Robots so we turned to our 6 year old who named them all pretty much on sight and off we went.
Alotta Money also created the Sanctified Bots Shrine in both the NFT and Crypto Voxels. In fact we will be doing a Robots Scifi Audio Visual set in Crypto Voxels at the Sanctified Bots Shrine with the bots on Friday May 28th at 7:30PM PST. Inside the shrine you will find a beautiful stained glass piece that celebrates the history of robot culture. R2D2 and C3P0 sit alongside Optimus Prime and the Terminator with the usual Alotta Money easter eggs.
Sacred Bionic Choir the NFT will be released on Super Rare just prior to the Crypto Voxels event. The piece includes full commercial rights to the music and is Alotta Money’s first ever audio visual NFT.
SuperRare is a marketplace to collect and trade unique, single-edition digital artworks.
