I Broke My Robot - "Tomorrow Does Not Exist"

I Broke My Robot - Take Alphacalm As Directed (Broken Fader Cartel 2007)

I Broke My Robot - Tomorrow Does Not Exist / Broken Fader Cartel

This review should've been done weeks ago, but what ordinarily takes only a few hours has grown to day after day of worrying and fretting and procrastinating. Sort of like Black Dice, I feared writing about this record... But not because it was a twisted pop record with a concept review waiting for it. No, Virginia's I Broke My Robot was something I feared writing about because I just could not delve deep enough. Tomorrow Does Not Exist is a virtually impenetrable wall of digital hardcore and late-90s techtronic wizardry that would make Prefuse 73 jealous if he were into that sort of thing. Robbie Hartless has the perfect name for his music: All humans, please check your expectations at the door and bring only something to receive the goodness found within.

"I'll Be Alone" starts you off exactly how the rest of the record will carry you: With clicks, clacks, beats and bothers that come at you like a flood of sounds. Processing it all on the first listen is impossible, simple as that. "Take Alphacalm As Directed" is one of the best tracks here partly because it hit me immediately with the spacey atmospherics that help give it a human soul that feels like it's lacking so often on this record.

A lot of people would take that as a diss, but in contrast I find it refreshing to be so incredibly difficult. There's something about I Broke My Robot's melodic touch that makes his music less intolerable than Mochipet. There's something about this album that gives me the will to listen to breakcore again. There's something about these songs that brings me back, over and over, to find something I recognize. It is always a struggle.

Hartless lists himself as "Experimental / Jungle / IDM" on the ol' MySpace page. Though it may not necessarily be literal, a listener comes to find exactly what "jungle" means in Broken Fader Cartel's universe of cracked rhythms and Richard D. James anthologies. The density of his sampling and snapping and twisting and crackling found throughout this record is astonishing. It's a thick forest of electronics and your only way out is the airy synths that provide the backdrop for tracks like "The Afternoon We Tried Suicide." Unless microtones are your thing; in which case, have a gander at "Rebuild(d8t)," complete with a minimal glitch beat and more synthetics given just a hint of life, an organic feel in a sea of BPM blowouts and mind-collapsing mayhem.

I already feel like I'm treading over the same paths other sources (XLR8R and CD Baby for starters) have hit, but the reason we all sound the same is because there's just nothing else. The artwork, conceptually simple but intricate in design, maps out perfectly what this record is all about: Put your brain at the mercy of a man who has sacrificed his own for an android's microchip. The result is that, on cursory listens, you come out feeling less human. That's when the weaker among you will take refuge in The Postal Service.

If you keep listening, something else emerges. It may take days, or weeks, or maybe years if you stick with it (and who has the time to bother doing that anymore?), but Tomorrow Does Not Exist has a soul. Robbie Hartless has tried his damnedest to keep it from us, but I hear it. I hear it in the humanity that's been chopped to pieces on "The Further Away." I hear it in the Air-on-speed "Not So Fast, You're Hurting Me." You have to listen closely, closer than any hundred-dollar headphones can get you. Like any album worth its salt, going back always reveals something new. The secret is that Tomorrow Does Not Exist is not a casual listen but a rewarding full-length whose density ostensibly defines what cannot be described: the sensation of revealing the humanity hiding behind every binary beat. Air-tight? Not quite. Those who fear will follow.