Automato

New York City hip hop group Automato is Alex Frankel, Ben Fries, Jesse Levine, Nick Millhiser, Andrew Raposo and Morgan Wiley. Completed in January of 2003, their forthcoming debut album was produced by James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy of the DFA.

The goal was to make an album that sounds and feels like the sample based hip hop records they love, yet capture the un-hip hop 'band' element of the group. They not only succeeded at this, but surpassed their expectations and the result is a testament to Automato's willingness to go where other hip hop groups will not. Automato's interests and aspirations lie beyond the pigeonhole of genre rap or underground hip hop and seem to branch into whatever the fuck they were feeling that day.

In the process of making the album, the DFA and Automato were never without a point of reference and everyone was listening to as much music as they were recording. It was common to find Nas' Illmatic, Can's Tago Mago, Pixies' Surfer Rosa, and David Axelrod's Songs of Experience vying for time on the studio's record player. Automato's is an album that, like any good hip hop record, is a product of its influences.

The vocals are somewhere between Cannibal Ox, Andre 3000, Jay Z, and Ghostface, while the beats recall a mid-nineties Pete Rock remix of Talking Heads covering Kraftwerk.