Inside Fiddlebox’s fourth album – ‘Tears of a Robot’

Fiddlebox’s fourth album, ‘Tears of a Robot’ is a collaboration with electronic musician Nick Swannell. It is analbum of fiddle-led, synth-heavy, evocative tunes featuring field recordings of wind turbines, waterwheels, and nineteenth century industrial machinery.

Deliberately cinematic in style, and with dystopian film classics in mind, this album gives the listener space to create their own images inspired by wide soundscapes.  The music evokes the sounds of industries gone by, and is filled with steampunk as well as ‘music concrete’ sensibility. The dramatic and atmospheric sound of a 100-metre tall wind turbine is fused with the emotive and lyrical melodies of Klezmer  (Eastern European Jewish) music, Sephardic songs from Renaissance Spain and new writing. The violin melody leads us on an emotional journey throughout the album, as the mood moves through lyrical sweetness, industrial grunge, and the sounds of windswept space.

Helen says  “my obsession with the cranky, intricate and funky sounds of mid 19th century industrial machinery has led to field recordings of wool carders and a spinning mule becoming the rhythmic driver behind these tunes”. Waterwheels and the machinery they drove have the beat and pulse of living beasts. They are contrasted here with the synthetic smoothness of both analogue and digital synthesisers; historical instruments from the 70ssynth revolution, as well as their digitised contemporaries.

By blending live, pre-recorded, and programmed sounds together a distinctive and unique sound palette andrhythmic sensibility have been created. The music explores the contrast between live performances, flawed, imperfect yet constantly intriguing, versus the perfect but blander regularity of electronically generated grooves and tones, and the ear catching irregularity and unexpected musicality of engineered machinery.  These three elements are woven together in this album.