When he plays a techno show, Moritz Simon Geist doesn't reach for a laptop. Instead, he calls on his army of sonic robots—a collection of small, motorized creations that click, clank, and whirr in an intricate mechanical symphony.
Geist composes robotic electronic music, a burgeoning genre of electro jams that relies on hardware, not software, to engineer electronic sounds and beats. His forthcoming EP, The Material Turn, debuts in October with four tracks made entirely from self-fashioned instruments—futuristic robo-kalimbas, a droning guitar, and salvaged hard drives turned into percussive beat machines.
Watching Geist play music is a little like watching a mad scientist in a lab. Trained as an electrical engineer, he is a man of materials, constantly tinkering with the instruments as they ping and plonk in front of him. Geist grew up playing the clarinet, piano, and guitar, so when he first started making electronic music in the 1990s, he found it strange that the music was all contained within a software interface on a screen. "I wanted something I could touch," he says. "So I built my own instruments."
Each of Geist's "instruments" is custom-made in his workshop in Dresden, Germany. Some are engineered to produce a specific sound, like his take on a kalimba, made from metal pieces and 3-D printed parts. Other instruments come by way of discovery, like finding that tapping a screwdriver against a metal lid makes a pleasant tinging noise.
The result isn't just a dynamic, throbbing album full of electrifying techno. For Geist, it's a way to push the frontiers of electronic musicmaking.
Mr. Robot
Mechanized instruments have been a curiosity for as long as music-makers could rig together parts. Take the first self-playing piano, the Forneaux Pianista,...