Robots In Love
Coming into this area at first it is difficult to discern shapes, because of the mist swirling across your eyes, but you can feel a dry heat coming up from the road in front of you, and the only sound is a wolf cry… but you cannot tell how far away it might be.
As you take a few steps forwards, you can just make out the shape of large rocks on either side of a road. Perhaps you wonder how it can be so warm, and yet so misty?
In between the howl of a wolf you hear something breathing close by, but it does not frighten you. The breath belongs to someone who is a friend! When you realise this, the space becomes suddenly light, and you understand that it is better to live in the light than in the darkness! You hear the song play: Hear the wolves cry, like you and I. Love is stronger, love is stronger, into light…
Video
Music
Artist Profile
Name: Robots In Love
Official Website: https://robotsinlovemusic.com/
Bio: I am absorbed in music. It constantly runs through my mind. Whatever emotions I feel are translated directly into songs. It excites me, enthralls me, heals me and explains me. I write about whatever is going on at that moment and I use lyrics to communicate. I’m glad music understands me (from the song “Radio Waves”). I use a computer to merge sounds, melodies and rhythms and I mould them until they evoke the exact feeling I need.
When I was young my dad (awesome bloke) took me to a concert to see AC/DC. The power of that rhythm guitar smashed me and for days afterwards I could think of nothing else and knew that I had to form a band. My dad bought me a bass guitar and made an amp out of an old valve radio. My school friend Kerry played guitar and we found Helen, a hard hitting drummer and my sister Jan joined on second guitar. We rehearsed in my parents’ lounge room, sustained by my mum’s homemade biscuits and milkshakes. We wrote a bunch of songs and played shows every weekend. We were only 15 so my dad drove us to the gigs. He was a great roadie. The band was called Gyn and were the first all-girl group in Australia and we’re in the “Who’s Who Of Australian Rock” encyclopedia.
I formed my second band, Press Gang, with the first friend I met at university, Jim Shnookal, who bought a Prophet 5 keyboard second hand from Icehouse and that was really the beginning of electronic music for us. We’ve got videos on YouTube with awesome funky guitar from Craig Morgan. After that I sang with Division IV who were great musicians, Dominic Diluca, Enzo Pannozzo, John Mascaro and George Pappas, who went on to join Real Life and is now Alien Skin. We released a 12″ single called Love Is The Way and played live on Countdown Revolution. The keytar lead break in that song is the piece of music that pops into my head more than any other. It’s on Bandcamp so check it out.
Then came Soulscraper. I was living in a share house and Chris Dubrow moved in and saw I had an Emax keyboard. He asked me to join his new band, he added Sarah Lord on bass, James Lynch on drums and I added my best mate from university days, Jim Shnookal, on keyboards. So we had two keyboard players and mixed with the heavy and precise drumming from James and the wild and heavy guitar from Chris laid the base for an electro-industrial-rock sound. Live, we were energetic and raucous as hell. We released two EPs, Heard It All Before and Neoanarcho. We played some cool support slots like Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, The Shamen, Hugo Race, Ratcat, a lot with Caligula, the Melbourne Big Day Out and Horden Pavilion in Sydney. We first heard one of our songs on the radio whilst driving over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Eventually the band split but we plan to release some of our tracks which didn’t make it onto either of the official releases.
My first solo release was a song called Eve on the Girlzone II compilation of female musicians and I played at the album release. The label manager originally refused to include Eve because he said that women don’t make industrial music. However, obviously I did so it ended up being included. I followed it with shows all over the place including Club Bizarre in Auckland (one of my favourite gigs) and the Third Ward goth festival in New York with Covenant on the bill. I joined up with an awesome bass player, Suzie Serelle, and we released an EP called People Don’t Go Out To Clubs To Get Laid and played shows, even on a mountain in Winter for Snowfest.
After that I produced an EP of dance tracks called Version 1.1. One of the songs, Friday Mornings, was placed on high rotation on radio stations, including Triple J and I played festivals like Dragonflight in Queensland and the huge Every Picture Tells A Story in Melbourne.
With guitarist Aaron Cliff I recorded the dark electronic album July. It was called “the best thing to come out of Australia this year”. I toured the album with guitarist Mik Thornley, playing Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Hobart. Mik still plays with me at Melbourne shows. I was also a guest vocalist on several tracks for a few bands, Pound System and Blank and I decided I had enough time to be in another band so with Pete Crane we became The Crystalline Effect. He produced the music and I was the vocalist, writing the lyrics and melodies. We supported VNV Nation in Sydney and went to Europe and played the Netherlands, Hungary, Latvia and Estonia. We released four albums, one double album and an EP. The music is half trip hop and half EBM. I still have people telling me that our songs mean a lot to them. I think our most successful song is Ada Makes The Machines Sing which is about Ada Lovelace who had the idea that computers could be used to create music. I am eternally thankful to her for coming up with that idea.
Then a bit of bad luck. My computer caught fire and my hard drive burnt. It took me a while to get set up again but eventually I did and I released the album My Very Essence. It has some great guest musicians including brilliant pianist Catherine Attard on the track Shelter and the impressive Darryn Long programming drums on When You Speak Of Love.
There’s been a a couple of other bands. I’ve played in Snog for 23 years and I recorded three songs with the awesome DevilMonkey, including Deluxe which is a very special song for me personally. And a band called I Forget (a difficult name to remember) which released a self titled album of smooth grooves and fun electro.
I moved to Dunedin in 2015. I fell in love with the place, especially the eclectic music scene. I changed the name of Sobriquet to Robots In Love and wish I’d done it earlier. For the first few years in Aotearoa I played solo. I was on the bill for the first Gathering Shadows in Wellington which is an awesome goth festival. I played Waitati Music Festival and supported Drab Majesty when they toured. I produced a lot of remixes for Melbourne bands Ikon, Suburban Spell, Caustic Grip and Lazyboy Proactive, for NZ bands Stars And The Underground and Justine O’Gadhra-Sharp and UK band Voidant.
Like Melbourne, Dunedin is a music city. There are more musicians per capita than anywhere else in New Zealand, and they love jamming. With vocalist, Miriam Leslie, I released two singles under the name Human Confusion. And I jammed with a bunch of other people and played shows with them. So many gigs, it was wonderful. And amongst that jamming, an amazing thing happened. With two brilliant musicians, drummer and producer Alex Burchell and bass player Tony Lumsden, Robots in Love became a band.
We have been playing together now for a year and it has been euphoric. Our music is epic, cinematic, powerful, evocative. It can broadly be called Electronic Rock but it encompasses many genres like dnb, synthwave, cyber, industrial, metal, dark pop, atmospheric. We’ve released three EPs: Gossip In Your Head, Alien Love and Unbreakable and had tracks released on several compilations. Our EPs feature remixes by myself and Alex. We are very excited about our next single, which is called The Sequel. It’s heeaavvyyy. We play live pretty much every week at different venues in Aotearoa. We are blissfully happy. We played shows in Melbourne in April and are heading back in October. See you then. – Elenor xxx