"'Mongoloid' by Devo describes me best," Add N to (X)'s theremin player, Ann Shenton, told a perplexed NME journalist in 1999. "It's self-explanatory. Everyone says I look like one in the morning." The band is a bizarre, retro-futurist's delight. (The name comes from a computer command that creates an unknown electronic third force.)

Last year's Add Insult to Injury album fairly whizzed along with its old-school WASP synthesizers and mischievous Moogs, a real-time demonic beat added courtesy of Th' Faith Healers drummer Joe Dilworth. It sounded like Kraftwerk minus the geek glasses, Photek with an enhanced sense of humor--or, for you Northwest souls, Seattle's IQU, only more so. Tracks like "Monster Bobby" and "Brothel Charge" rampaged like a bevy of bruisers let loose in an Art of Noise hair salon. If nothing else, Shenton and fellow conspirator Richard Claydon (with his Korg Micro-Preset) proved that geeks can be great.

"Heaven is having with an octopus," Shenton went on to explain to the NME journalist. "Can you imagine? They've just discovered octopuses have a sense of humor and that they like to play. They might be quite, erm, multidextrous. I could have eights!"

Think that's strange? Third member Barry 7 played at a customized "synth duel" at London's Victoria & Albert museum last year. Also, Jon Spencer contributes to "Wax Gravy" from the recent "Poker Roll" single, and he sounds okay! Now that is weird. (Also, the band has attained a degree of notoriety for a couple of its "pornographic" robot sex videos.)

In the near future, the London trio aims to investigate the fusion between the biological and the synthetic, with the erection of a Buckminster Fuller-inspired dome in a Bourges gallery. It will act as a mobile propaganda post, and will contain a theremin operated by a number of finches that will unconsciously produce sounds that will be amplified and recorded each day and catalogued for the duration of the show.

Come on in and pull up a pink or blue one. The wave modulation's just fine.