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Friday, September 3, 2010

Tonight / ??!! / Bumbershoot Marimba-Playing Robot To Jam With Chris Brokaw and King Crimson's Trey Gunn Today

Posted by Travis Ritter on Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 7:00 AM

This just in from the department of does not compute! Shimon The Improvising Robot Musician will be performing a FREE SHOW alongside King Crimson's Trey Gunn and former Come/Codeine member Chris Brokaw as part of the Sound Human art exhibition today at 6pm in the Lopez Room at Seattle Center (the exhibit, which will be open all Labor Day weekend, opens to the public at noon today).

Shimon was designed by Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology and "programmed to listen to, recognize, play, and improvise jazz music. Not only can Shimon play music, but he is also a fully animated simulation of a marimba player and can actually respond to his environment, right down to bobbing his “head” and “feeling” the music." Seriously. A robot. A smooth-grooving, marimba-playing, head-banging robot.

Let me get this straight: This "Jazz Robot" (as Stephen Colbert called it in May) will be playing alongside King Crimson's Trey Gunn, who is one of progressive rock's finest axe-men, as well as with the slow, dark indie rocker Chris Brokaw? And it's FREE? Does Paul Allen know about this? Will it be like Johnny 5 playing the xylophone in Short Circuit 2? Just the thought of this makes me wanna pour over my circuit board manuals while listening to prog jazz fusion (ya feel me, nerds?)

To think of all the money we've spent on tickets to see people play on their laptops, this will surely top most things you'll see at Bumbershoot all weekend (aside from The Spits. Nobody, not even a robot, is better than The Spits.)