I love the idea of treating the act of making music as a laboratory scientific exercise. This approach clearly has a longand co lourful history going back at least to fifties Exotica, taking in Joe Meek, Jack Nitzsche and perhaps even Phil Spector. Then on through the Space Age with drug Psychedelicists such as West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Silver Apples and United States of America, onto the Seventies and daddies of the genre Kraftwerk, Talking Heads and Devo, and from there to Nineties Post Modernists Stereolab and Broadcast.
Plenty of disciples of the sub-genre have carried the flame onward since then. Now New York's Operator Music Band issue forth their own contribution to this particular cause with their glistening new album, Duo Duo. Their clinical, non-more prosaic name and the picture on the record sleeve tell the story of what they're about very well.
This is an album made by humans but explicitly designed to sound as if it wasn't. It's a pop record in many respects, the machines programmed with melody and rhythm in mind rather than abrasion and distortion. As a result the end effect is alluring rather than alienating.
The band switch vocals from track to track between Dara Hirsch to Jared Hiller. Mostly I prefer Hirsch's entries to Hiller's as he's rather too obviously smitten by David Byrne, ( the tracks fronted by Hirsch are generally the ones I've posted). This unevenness in terms of the appeal of everything here mean Duo Duo probably won't make my end of year album list but there's much here that's quite thrilling in terms of its blend of the old and the new and its sheer replicant pop savvy.
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