A story behind every 'Building A Better Boy' song...

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1. Action Figures.
I've wanted to do a female robotic'esque, computer voice track for a 
while, I like female vocals against brash minimal electronics, this is 
why I recently completed an album & ep with the vocals & poems of USA 
Seattle based poet Lorian Elbert. I really like the slight female voice 
against electronic soundscapes, the lyrics are just a comment about the 
stupidity of the human race in general, we all seem to be impressed & look 
up to wealthy people, politicians, celebrities, sports stars and any other 
fool who is in a position of power, we ARE apparently intelligent human 
beings and for some reason what we do with our intelligence and experience 
is find better ways of killing each other, especially those who don't behave, 
think or believe in the same things we do....one day we may learn...then 
again maybe not !!! maybe one day we will all get our asses kicked by a non 
religious, non peacefull race of robots from venus...........now that would 
make things interesting !

2. Building A Better Boy.
Building a better boy again is another vocal driven swipe at our society, how 
do we solve problems of hatred & violence, especially on our streets, well nobody 
has come up with any decent ways to sort things out so I kinda thought, it would 
be great to be able to build a better boy from scratch, so listen to the lyrics, 
all the ingredients are there, haha ! thats my idea and yes it would look just 
like the image on the album cover...I like robots, robots are good !

3. Ryming.
Yes I know its spelt in a unusual way...but hey, who cares !, the idea came from
watching anime, I won't name the movie, but I as I watched the final titles
scrolling down the screen, I just felt I could write something much more appropriate 
over the final titles, so I wrote & recorded Ryming pretty quickly and low & behold 
it worked much better, unfortunately the makers of the movie never got to hear the 
track, oh well such is life !

4. Petrified.
This was actually my favourite track to record of all the stuff on Building
A Better Boy, it was just a simple idea to write a track which would be great
as a theme tune to a cheesy, japanese type animated robot cartoon, I 
could just imagine images, robots flying at you as all those synth runs 
swirled around, it was also recorded with no sequencing at all, its all 
played live to my Fostex multitrack machine, which gives it a nice grubby 
loose feel.

5. Riffs End.
The opening of this track was to try and create something kinda spooky,
atmospheric, but still with a little added cheese, the spooky synth
motif runs almost constantly through the track so it keeps the atmosphere
up, there are literally only 3 or four sounds in this track,
so its very minimal, plus I wanted to add the drum solo in the middle,
I suppose most people would call it a drum break, but being a drummer I
call it a solo, this break/solo was just a cut & paste job after the
track was mixed.

6. Signs. 
Every track on this album I feel has a memorable riff/pattern/sequence
somewhere in the track, a part of the track which is the theme for the 
whole song, I wanted this again to sound like the drum patterns
are not quite in time with the bass line etc, using computers can 
make evrything sound very tight and perfect...so its nice to 
offset the almost perfect synth sounds/patches with mistakes,
its nice to screw with the timing now and then...look I'm a drummer, 
thats my job !

7. Slave 2 Mind.
Prince always used '2' instead of 'to' in his song titles...I like that
...having said that he had no influence over the track whatsoever,
I just liked the look of the title on paper so I wrote a tune around
it.

8. Dog Sign.
I love flabby/phatty bass lines, this track is all about the bass line
when I was recording this track, I had in mind the Kraftwerk video
for Trans Europe Express, it was just that lovely old silver steel 
train riding the rails at breakneck speed, oh ! inspirational stuff.

9. Debate.
As near as I'll ever get to creating a Hardfloor track, it starts off
in dreamland and it kiks in all Hardfloor but very soon goes all hooky
& cheesy again, I was kinda trying to get an elcetro krautRock vibe overall,
although whether I've achieved it, doesn't really matter & to be honest I
don't really care, it works for me and thats all that matters.

written & pandered over by machine boy, january too thousand & ate.

Machine Boy PR Enq: Joan Fleming.
e : joan@8pr.co.uk
w : www.8pr.co.uk

Machine Boy Management/Booking Enq: George Bond. 
e : george@machineboy.co.uk