Droid to the world

Based in Germany for the past number of years, Dubliner and DFA stalwart Marcus Lambkin, aka Shit Robot, returns home at the start of next month for a Forbidden Fruit slot. Having released a well-received debut album, From The Cradle To The Rave in 2010, of late Lambkin has been working on a series of 12 inches he intends to put out this year. Given the collective title The Green Machine, the first of the three planned records, featuring the tracks ‘Teenage Bass’ and ‘Space Race’, surfaced recently, and Lambkin says the idea was to give himself some creative breathing space.

“I was sort of thinking of that early DFA style of not worrying about albums or videos or any of that stuff you get caught up in,” he explains. “That approach doesn’t even really work anymore, it’s kind of like, ‘What’s the point?’ You sort of put your life and soul into something for a few years, and you come up with an album. Then two months before it comes out, boom, it’s on some Russian website, and everybody’s downloaded it before you’ve even finished the artwork, and it has little or no impact.
“Not that making albums is wrong, I still want to do that, but I wanted to go back to my first 12s, where it’s two tracks, no remixes – just sort of retarded instrumental dance music.”
There goes that Wire front-cover then. Marcus says that one of the planned tracks for The Green Machine will feature guest vocals from Luke Jenner, frontman with fellow DFA veterans The Rapture, with whom he’s shortly to play some dates in Germany. Moving in DFA circles in New York afforded Marcus the opportunity to engage with a wide range of musicians, and he tweeted recently of his sadness at the passing of the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch, whom he once met.
“I was lucky to meet those guys,” he reflects. “Weirdly enough, James Murphy used to play basketball with Ad Rock, who had another band, BS 2000, with one of the guys from Suicidal Tendencies. Their album was one of the first records that came out on DFA. They produced it there and that’s where I met Ad Rock. I’ve sort of been DJing and meeting my idols for years, and you get over that, but meeting him was still... he’s the nicest guy ever. He’s really smart, and he’s able to disarm you – he’s really able to put you at ease very quickly.
“But I was still very freaked out by him. It was like, ‘I’m talking to Ad Rock, this is weird!’ And then we ran into him one night and we went to some gallery thing that Mike D was doing. They’re all just Joe Normal dudes. But it was still a very freaky experience, you can’t get away from that teenager thing of, ‘I’m talking to the Beastie Boys’. I don’t like tweeting about stuff like that or anything, but it kind of hit me. There’s a lot of people dying these days, because we’re all getting to that age, but that kind of affected me a bit. It was very sad.”
Moving on to happier topics, Marcus says that he hasn’t seen his buddy James Murphy lately, although notes that he will be staying with the LCD Soundsystem mainman when he travels to New York shortly to flesh out the Luke Jenner collaboration. I mention Mr. Murphy’s recent trip to Japan for GQ, in the company of comic Aziz Ansari and Momufku chef David Chang. The trio had been hanging out at an Arcade Fire after-show, and tweeted wondering if there were any magazine editors who’d subsidise a trip to Japan to explore the country’s food.
“He was telling me about that trip,” says Marcus, “and I was raging, because Tokyo is also my favourite place in the world. The first time I went there I went with James, and I had the best experience. I was taken around to all the amazing restaurants, and you just eat the most amazing food. But yeah, he told me about the trip. You’re hanging out with Aziz Ansari, and getting treated to the best food. It’s one of those once-in-a-lifetime trips.”