If there’s one common aspect that ties all types of heavy metal together, it’s got to be the sheer energy that it carries. Nothing else quite gets your pulse pumping, neck snapping and bowels banging like high-tempo thrash, grindcore, or a slab of doom metal. Adding the tech coolness of robots to it all should make for musical mana, but as one band in China recently demonstrated, it can just as easily make it musical mud.
Before you start thinking I’m being far too overdramatic here, it’s best to check out the above footage from a music festival in China, taken earlier this month. The clip is from PNDbotics, a company that designs and manufactures a humanoid robot called Adam, and it seems to have decided that a collab with a popular band is a great way to showcase its achievements.
On paper, that sounds like a great idea, and if anyone came up to me and said, ‘Hey, we want to have our robot banging out some live music with your hot band!’, I’d jump at the chance. I’d be imagining that it’d be like a Terminator, stomping about giving the crowd laser-death stares, all while shredding on a guitar or hammering out some 64-note bass drum patterns.
Sadly, what musician Hy Yu Tong and his band actually got was a glorified keytar (keyboard shaped like a guitar) controller and not a great one at that. I won’t say that it’s terrible because that could imply that there’s some modicum of possibility that my judgment is purely a matter of taste. It’s abysmal, in every sense of the word.
Let’s start with the fact that this is supposed to be a demonstration of PNDbotic’s tech. The robot barely moves for a start; there’s a bit of arm waving, but it’s otherwise rooted to the spot, and even the movement of the fingers is slow and clunky. I suppose one could claim that it’s emulating your average metal bass guitar player.
Then there’s the actual music it’s playing. Complex polyrhythms? Wicked fast legato scales? Multi-octave arpeggios? All of these and many more are highlights of the brief composition by their complete and utter absence. Fortunately, the handful of notes it churns out are so buried in the mix that they’re hard to pick out, so you can thankfully enjoy the music, despite the presence of HAL-9000-call-your-grandma.
And no, I’m not being unduly harsh here. This could have been so much better, as PNDbotics could have gone down the creepy-bot route for metal kudos or have something running around the stage for an Angus vibe, even if it didn’t play any live instruments.
For a showcase of PNDbotic’s work, it would have been fine in 2005, but Johnny 5 ain’t alive in 2025, that’s for sure. It’s a real shame because the Adam robot could actually be really good. This brief demonstration, though, does a very good job of not showing that. Back to the drawing board on this one, folks.