midnight juggernauts: uncanny valley

One of Australia's most fearlessly independent, individual, and inventive bands, Midnight Juggernauts are back bearing gifts with Uncanny Valley. In robotic engineering and CGI, the uncanny valley is a hypothesis -- coined by legendary roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. He wrote in his work Bukimi no Tani Gensho: "I have noticed that, in climbing toward the goal of making robots appear human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley, which I call the uncanny valley." This "uncanny valley" is a phenomena in which human acceptance of robots grows more welcoming the more human their appearance, until they become too human, in which there's suddenly a precipitous plunge from acceptance to revulsion. The dark depths of this philosophical valley is a space the trio -- Vincent Vendetta, Andrew Szekeres, and Daniel Stricker -- have long explored. Running traditional rock instruments (guitar, keyboards, drums) through samplers, pedals, patches, and assorted effects, they pervert the familiar into slightly-off forms; robotic sounds made by human hands, with the waft of unsettling horror-soundtracks keeping things forever on edge. Since forming in Melbourne in 2004, the band has forged a unique path, pressing themselves firmly into the popular and unpopular consciousness, refusing to be bound by boundaries of genre, convention, or expectation. Eschewing an easy parochial path, Midnight Juggernauts have instead been international; taking their psychedelic Soviet-sci-fi pop to listeners near and far, around the corner and around the globe. Uncanny Valley is 43 minutes of warm-hearted cold wave, interstellar harmonies, early 1950s house, steeped in the darkness of dusty giallo soundtracks, audio spomeniks at once futuristic and rustic, a bold musical future envisaged through a soundtrack to a forgotten Eastern Bloc Tarkovsky film, sifting through the ruins of LPs past.