Captured! By Robots is what happens when you take a misanthropic musician and throw him in a room with a bunch of tools and scrap metal—he builds his own emotionally abusive robotic band. (You have to see it to understand, which you can do tonight at the Highline.) The first time I saw Captured! By Robots play, I thought it was the most brilliant, hilarious thing ever. But since forming in San Francisco in 1997, C!BR has attracted company: There are now at least three other robotic bands around the world—most recently, an impressive trio from Germany called Compressorhead, whose video of them playing Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” has racked up more than six million views on YouTube.

I recently had a chance to talk to C!BR mastermind Jay Vance (aka JBOT) about his thoughts on these robot bands following in his footsteps.

Compressorhead (Germany)
JBOT: “It’s three dudes. Every dude made their own robot, the technology is great. They’re German so they’re good at killing my people and making robots and doing things very precisely. All the engineering on them is gorgeous. [He said some technical stuff here I didn’t understand.] They actually have a moving matrix of air cylinders. It’ll be over each fret or string. It’s really cool but why I don’t like it is you can’t see shit working because it’s all covered. As far as the band, it’s great that they’re doing what they’re doing. But I’ve fallen out of love with covers. They’ll probably come out with a robot singer, then it’ll be more of a show. Now they do covers of AC/DC but without a singer. I’d say their guitar and bass robots are more accurate than mine, GTRBOT, but their drum robot? DRMBOT could kick their ass.”

The Trons (New Zealand)
JBOT: “I wasn’t super impressed. It was okay. It was much more DIY. It’s interesting but they’re more like making a robotic instrument. The robot instruments play but it’s not heads and bodies and characters, they’re not anthropomorphic.”

The Z Machines (Japan)
JBOT: “Zima poured a bunch of money into this band for the Japanese market. They hired a robotic designer to make these robots. If you hired a mechanical engineer to make these things they’re going to be amazing, you know? But do they have a soul? No, they’re corporate garbage. They easily spent $200,000 or more on these things. It is impressive. And they had some professional DJ–Squarepusher–program some songs for them. It’s kinda cool and they look really crazy. The guitar robot has fiberoptic hair and a screen for a face. It’s got corporate bullshit written all over it. It feels like Disneyland said, ‘Make a bunch of crazy robots.’ It shows what money can do in making robots. And the music is nothing too fancy. None of them play punk rock or hardcore. They’re all very tepid. The one song from Squarepusher, it was kind of new-agey.”

Captured! By Robots is the subject of a new documentary, a limited edition of which will be available for sale at tonight’s show.