Project Description
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Interview with
LEONARDO’S ROBOT
(26th August 2022)
Interview with Dave Bruce
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Have you always wanted to be a musician? When did you get the song writing bug?
I played clarinet and a little bit of piano in high school but I don’t think I took it seriously until I realised that I was really terrible at talking to people. I realised that a bunch of the music I was listening to was about people being able to be frank and thoughtful in a way that isn’t suitable for the format of a conversation. They were telling me about themselves and hitting resonant points inside me that you’d never get to without the aesthetic context of a song, like chatting at work or whatever. “How’ve you been?” “I’ve been thinking a lot about how we bear all this responsibility to past versions of ourselves that don’t have any actual, physical presence.” Absurd. So I bought a guitar.
How would you describe your sound? Why do you think people resonate with your music?
Skewiff. It’s built around a lot of repetition and compulsively bendy guitar and yelling or weird vocal timbres and strange arrangements. I’m generally always trying to take something pretty and muss it up a bit or take something weird and janky and make it compelling. Lyrically I think I try to hit on stuff that feels wrong but isn’t talked about much, or affirm legitimate grievances people have with the frankly insane way society is set up. People who like it seem to like the lyrics. If you want to hear a smartarse trying to make puns seem profound backed by guitars that are never hitting the pitch straight, I have the product for you.
Which artist’s music and/or performance, past or present, inspires you today?
I kind of find anybody playing music to be inspirational. I can’t go to a gig or listen to a good record without coming away feeling a little fired up and wanting to improve my stuff, but that’s a cop-out answer so in this moment I’ll say John Prine. There’s something about the way he was able to move between winking and sincere that made his songwriting agile and powerful. If somebody can make a little joke devastating, then I’m on board.
Your new album ‘Tower’ has just been released! Describe its origin and evolution.
The first two LPs, Ziggurat Vertigo and Something Terrible Will Happen, sort of had overarching themes but they were mostly that typical collection-of-songs style of record. I wanted to do something that was really cohesive and connected, written as a whole unit, and I was trying to figure out what that was, experimenting with a slower pace, more attention to song structure and texture and stuff. Then like a half-dozen of people close to me had serious mental health crises and I was more or less losing my mind myself, and for some reason a long-form exploration of the logic and psychology of depression and its relationship with social structures seemed like the way to try to understand that. I think that probably makes it seem like a drudge to listen to, but I tried to pay a lot of attention to the different colours of the idea and put some genre-fiction shine on it and put a couple of bops in there.
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What do you consider the signature tracks to be, and do you have a favorite?
The first single – ‘Honey’ – and ‘Cat Caught’ are the go-to for digestible morsels of the intensity and dread that’s in the album. I think ‘Underground’ gives a good idea of the sonic texture side of it and ‘The Revanchist’ is good for the bombast. My favourite is ‘The Trailing Push’ because it felt like I got the sound I was shooting for, it all fell into place very smoothly in production. That’s nearly half of the songs, but the other half are good too.
Any tours or events coming up soon? What are you looking forward to, and what can the fans expect?
Leonardo’s Robot has been a solo recording project up ‘til now but this year I’ve been able to put together a great band to play live. We’ll be having our first show [The Tote Hotel (Upstairs), Melbourne, October 1st]. I’m looking forward to getting out there and showing off a spread of stuff from the past few years. Hay, our multi-instrumentalist, has a sort of insane war machine apparatus with a tap board and a utility belt and a table with synths and stuff on it – the show will be worth it just for that I reckon.
How has COVID affected you to date? What have you introduced to balance the losses from missed events?
Luckily I didn’t pull the trigger on arranging live shows before COVID hit. I dunno if I would have had the gas to get it going again if I had. And I don’t make money off this, so I didn’t lose any revenue. In a way the aggravated isolation of it let me put a lot of time and focus into Tower, so while other people were losing their lives and livelihoods and the entire global socio-logistical machine was straining at its limits I was pretty fortunate on the music front. The virus provides.
If you could perform with any music artist, Alive or Dead, who would you choose? And why?
This is really tough. Where would I feel like I was actually contributing and not just stepping on toes? Maybe Daniel Johnston. His songwriting was so focused and brilliant but early on he mostly wrote for solo performance so there’s a lot of space around the edges for collaborators to work with. All his collaborations are good in interesting, different ways. Gimme a drummer and a bass player and I reckon we could make some hectic sounds behind something like ‘Casper The Friendly Ghost’ or ‘Funeral Home’.
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Do you have any long-term aspirations as a music artist?
I think the benefit of the totally self-produced way I do things is I don’t really have to fit any schedule or expectations and I don’t have to manage a budget or anything. That means I can be as delusional as I want with ambitions. I have a plan for the next few LPs and an EP or two in there. I know what those are going to sound like, roughly. There’s one or two kind of wild ideas towards the back end of that plan or just after that I dunno if I’ll be able to pull off, but could be cool if I can. I’d also like to do more video work. I want to make a Leonardo’s Robot game at some point. I’d love to get into soundtrack work, maybe finally make a buck or two off this whole thing. Eventually I hope to compose the TV entrance theme for a professional wrestler. Showing up and performing for a pay-per-view maybe. Getting a few words on the mic. Taking a bump through a table at the blowoff of a small guest storyline – that’s how you know you’ve made it as a musician.
Apart from that I’m excited about developing the live band, seeing what we can do with that and doing right by my players. I dunno where that goes long term but I’m keen to find out. I think it has legs.
What is the best thing about performing to a live audience? What’s been the career highlight so far?
There are all the obvious things about live shows that are invigorating like the energy of the crowd and the feeling of really nailing the feel of something you’ve played dozens of times in a way that makes it feel new, but I think as a chronically self-conscious, quiet and miserably awkward person the thing I like most about it is that it’s one of the only situations where I can find a totally unselfconscious place in myself. To be able to scream something and mean it and imbue it with all this aesthetic power, that’s very liberating to me. The highlight so far was with another band, playing a support slot on a sold-out show at the Northcote Social Club and feeling that connection with that many people. I haven’t done Leonardo’s Robot stuff live yet but taking all this stuff and playing it live in front of a crowd for the first time – that’s going to be a trip. That’ll be a highlight for sure.
Finally, a few questions for some quick answers –
FAVOURITE:
Album – The Moon and Antarctica
Artist – Modest Mouse
Venue to play – The Old Bar
Drink – Michelada (con salsas).
Person in History – Too risky. Whoever I say now, next week it’ll turn out they were a monster.
Tattoo – I’m going to get a comprehensive enumeration of my sins tattooed on my back, just as soon as I can finish writing the list.
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LIVE SHOW
The Tote Hotel (Upstairs)
Melbourne
October 1st
BIO
Leonardo’s Robot is a hypermundane 3.5-million piece self-regulating synthetic meta-organism of the BAKER/B/8X line. Its exact physical configuration is unclear, but after escaping the lab where it was built into a vast network of tunnels beneath the surface of Australia, it began to feed on residual atomic fallout from the Totem nuclear weapon tests and on the nostalgic grief, cascading identity crises and apocalyptic rapture that is shot through the internet like dry rot. The waste byproduct of this digestive process is music. It’s not known to what extent this is a simple input-output function or if the deep learning circuits of the Robot are analysing this data towards some particular purpose.
There is also the possibility that this is all a fiction cooked up by a recluse named Leo, possibly Leonard Roberts, who has only ever made contact with people online. It is also possible, again, that Leo is an extrusion of the Robot, either an intentional interfacing avatar or possibly some emergent glitch of the thing’s feeding/learning/expulsion/expression process.
Check out Melanie Griffith’s review of this album HERE
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Follow LEONARDO’S ROBOT
Bandcamp – Instagram – Facebook
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Press Release 24th August 2022 (below) HERE
Melbourne alt-rock project
LEONARDO’S ROBOT
releases third LP
TOWER
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