Thanks to everyone who came to Robot Vs Dinosaur last Fri, hope you all had a fantastic night. Arc Vel laid down some strikingly organic-sounding beats, gorgeously augmented by live guitar and beautiful undersea visuals, whilst those foolishly sat outside smoking during Portmanteau‘s set missed a flawless exercise in owl-rotation, soundtracked by their trademark ultra-glitchy techno stylings… Check out the video below, filmed by Klunk main-man Gary:

Watch this space as we’ll have photos from the event up very soon. Meanwhile, Robot Vs Dinosaur will be back upstairs at Island Bar come Friday 18th July- full details will be announced very shortly, so keep your ear to the ground…

Lock up your dinos… Robot Vs Dinosaur #5 is just around the corner! Taking place at Island Bar (next door to the Alex theatre, just ’round the corner from Sunflower Lounge) this coming Friday, our forthcoming event will see us breaking boundaries and smashing genres together to create a soundclash of epic proportions…

Friday’s event features a headline performance from Bristol’s Portmanteau (pictured)- self-proclaimed Roy Castlecore kings, they’ll be casually knocking brains from skulls with their mutant, glitch-infested acid-techno dancefloor stompers. On a totally different bent is Brum’s own Arc Vel; his skittering beats and bracing sonic textures will be a warm hug to fans of the likes of Four Tet, Tortoise and Cinematic Orchestra.

And as ever, we’ll be DJing more abstract techno, breakcore, laptoptronica, drill ‘n’ bass, indietronica, chipcore and [insert-genre-here] than your brain can possibly handle… Doors open at 8:30, with admission costing a mere £3 or just £1 if dressed as a robot or dinosaur! Free pin badge on entry! Drop us a comment if you’ve any last-minute requests…

See you there, it’s gonna be well-oiled… just like a terminator.

It seems that quite a few of our live acts have video online as well as music- consequently, we’ve set up a Robot vs Dinosaur YouTube channel to aggregate videos which are relevant to what we’re doing. As well as collecting together content by live acts at Robot Vs Dinosaur, we’ll also be posting anything which we think might be of interest to RvD punters as well as anyone who might be into electronic music in general.

As with most things we do, we intend this to be a community-driven effort so please leave a comment or drop us a line if there’s any content missing which ought to be up there. We’d also very much appreciate any suggestions or advice on how we can do this sort of thing more effectively- prior to our embracing of the social internet last week our ‘net connections were mainly used to Rickroll people and torrent old Phil Collins albums, so to say we’re a bit new to this sort of thing would be a bit of an understatement!

Finally, here’s a warm-up for Portmanteau‘s performance at this coming Friday’s Robot Vs Dinosaur event– a Rubik-tastic video for their track ‘Skyline’, submitted by onionmilk and animated by a character known only as “Sainty”. Sainty’s identity remains a mystery- more news as it breaks.

RvD March headliner Calika (aka Brighton’s Simon Kealoha) has recently pulled the wraps off his new musical project, Zermatt. A collaboration with Berlin-based electroacoustic artist Phon°noir, the new band sees both stepping out of their respective comfort zones.

An album is currently in the works, but in the meantime hit up their myspace and enjoy a couple of demos showcasing a fresh yet atmospheric electro-pop sound not too far removed from the likes of Schneider TM and The Notwist. On “Rainhead”, long-time Calika fans will be relieved to find his trademark electric bass stylings accounted for.

Looks like we’re not the only ones with a shiny new toy to play with! After several months of hosting nothing more than an amusing teletext-based splash page, top London technomentalist and previous RvD headliner Datassette has finally got ’round to relaunching his website.

The new site includes an extensive discography, a selection of downloadable mixes (including his infamous BusinessFunk series) and bucketloads (and, I really mean bucketloads) of unreleased tracks, demos, cover versions and remixes all available for absolutely nothing. A particular standout for me is “Thomas the Mohfuggin Tank Engine Yo”, a sharp piece of social commentary in which the artist reworks a timeless children’s classic to archly reflect the decaying moral values of modern youth- or, maybe it’s just a glitched-up version of the Thomas the Tank Engine theme with some swearing stuck on top? We’ve embedded it in a player at the bottom of this post, so give it a spin and draw your own conclusions…

Meanwhile, Datassette’s debut self-titled full-length album has been continuously rotating at RvD Towers over the past few weeks. A melting pot heavily influenced by mathematics, ’80s corporate video soundtracks, old-school electro and the sound of vintage computer games, his nimble yet muscular techno constructs remind one of Alan Sugar doing the robot in his boardroom after a lovely sunny afternoon spent firing people. The album’s available right now as a download via Bleep or Beatport, whilst turntablists and vinyl badgers should hit the Ai Records shop to purchase an ultra-dense disco plate.

Anyway, find some mo-fuckin’ Thomas the Tank Engine shit in tha player below, yo.
[audio:datashat-thomastank.mp3]

Google, Yahoo and co- watch your backs! Following some 1200 cigarettes, a couple hundred cups of coffee and god only knows how many late nights, the official Robot Vs Dinosaur online social interspace is finally installed and running.

As well as providing up-to-the-minute info on forthcoming RvD events and activities, we’ll also be using this opportunity to keep you informed on what our past performers are up to as well as covering various events, websites and other random goings-on within Birmingham and elsewhere, across both cyber and meatspace. Expect the odd late-night drunken rant too- this is a blog after all!

Building this site nearly killed us, so we very much hope you like it- if you’ve any feedback then please leave us a comment or drop an email to info [at] robotvsdinosaur.co.uk or get in touch via our myspace or facebook pages, although obviously we won’t be held responsible if the site causes your computer to burst into flames or makes your ceiling fall down. We’re always keen to get people involved with what we’re doing, so any DJ requests, suggestions or constructive criticism will be very welcome. Similarly, get in touch if you’ve got any photos taken at one of our nights and we’ll gladly put them up in our lovely new gallery!

Anyway, enough talk- enjoy, and we’ll hopefully see you at our next event on Friday June 20th!