Modern Robot is a band from Greensboro, North Carolina. Ben Singer plays keys, Kyle Poehling plays drums, and a variety of guests join us.
After releasing a web album of original music, we started to play shows accompanied by movies. Pretty soon, we got distracted by the movies, and started watching them during shows.
Our shows now are based on movies, and improvising sound tracks to them.
We assemble shows from public domain and creative commons films. These are often ephemeral films: films created for sales reps, instructional films, industry films, and the like. We’ve also done feature films that have made their way into the public domain, and silent films. We perform a live show to the films, improvising the music.
As a second step, we take a recording of the live show and put it back into the movie that was shown. At this point, we’ll add in pieces of the original sound track of the movie, giving the music a found-sound feel, and often creating themes not present in the live show. Sometimes we can even work some of the original music in with the show, even though we couldn’t hear that part of the movie while we played it.
These are the movies you see posted on this site. Each is a live show, and entirely improvised.
For booking or if you are just interested in what we are doing, please contact us:
You can also find more at our web sites:
www.benesing.com
www.kylepoehling.com