Add N to(X): The Next Step in Robot Rock, and the Infamous Fucking Machine

Add N To (X)

Always lurking just under the sheets, Add N to (X)'s cyberporn perversion comes of age on the band's newest album, Add Insult to Injury. The video for the first single, "Plug Me In," is a softcore romp straight into the pants of two nubile 19-year-olds and features security-cam undie shots, erect nipple closeups and other miracles of easily maneuverable digital video, as well as a cameo appearance by the infamous Add N to (X) fucking machine.

Add N to (X) member and the video's director, Barry Smith, spoke with me from London.

So what the hell is lexical synthesia anyway?

It's kind of an involuntary thing. You get confused, a color becomes a sound or an object become a color. It's not a willful thing. We all suffer from it more or less. It's a way of kind of describing your music in nonmusical terms. We don't feel like we're musicians and we're not artists, either. I've got no interest in being an artist. The music comes from a specific idea. Like a picture or a melody. And then it will evolve from that. For instance, "Metal Fingers" happened because we found a French 60s porn mag in the street in Brussels and we opened it and saw this picture of a robot in bed with this woman. It seemed like that related to this particular riff that I was mucking about with at the time. Then those two things became the song "Metal Fingers in My Body." That was a translation of part of the text that was under the picture. There are different ways of approaching music, but it's music that you funnel all these ideas into.

Is there a cohesive theme to this album, a sort of sex and machine atmosphere?

Well, there's no absolute concept to it, because everything is sort of done on the fly. The reason why we use synthesizers rather than guitars is because synthesizers, you can be working with them for weeks and not getting anything you want out of them, but the sound is always changing and then one day suddenly it's like, "Wait a minute, that's exactly the sound of a vibrator." And so that becomes "Plug Me In." That's kind of the way we work. It's very haphazard.

Still, it's not everyone who would interpret an arbitrary synth sound as the buzz of a vibrator. You're definitely coming at it with sex on the brain. It's the same with the videos you folks are making.

For the "Metal Fingers" video it was exactly the same kind of imagery, the same sort of drawings as the cartoon in the magazine we found in the street. Then I sort of came up with a story line for it. Imagining what led up to that image. Wondering how that robot got in bed with that woman. The "Plug Me In" video was designed to fulfill a different sort of function. In England we've never been allowed to see or make hardcore pornography. By some strange fluke we're now allowed to see it. What I was interested in was inciting a debate. I mean, you can see extreme violence in the media but you can't see extreme pleasure.

English sexual attitudes are pretty strange. So we got involved in this debate on pornography. Because I think porn is a moral mirror in the same way that drugs are, where it's up to you as an individual how far you take it?the idea being that you as an individual have control. The notion that if you smoke marijuana you're going to become a heroin addict or that if you watch hardcore pornography you're going to be a rapist, that's a simplistic idea. In intellectual circles, pornography is considered rubbish, which it is. Nothing's being made that's sexy and erotic and not trashy. So we decided to take it one step further and actually make porn. Although I don't actually consider the "Plug Me In" film to be porn, I think of it more as a sex film.

What's the difference?

I don't like hardcore porn. It takes on a sort of Evel Knievel attitude toward sex that I find rather sadistic. You're putting women into these horrible situations, with the same crap lighting, the same sofa over and over and over again, as opposed to art porn, which has some sort of moral context in relationship with the sexual activity. I wanted to show sex as it was. So we took these surveillance cameras, which are normally used to record violent images such as theft, or crimes; you turn it around and record pleasure with them. We gave them to the women and had them record what they found sexy as they were making love. You look back at 60s and 70s porn and it was about the details. Supervixens, Mondo Topless, Russ Meyer's films?that was a different sort of portrayal of sexuality than what you see now. It became dreadful video images. We wanted to put the fun back into it and be very playful and sensual and also be incredibly filthy.

What's great about porn is that you don't need a narrative, the actual sexual action is the performance, the narrative that drives it. I talked to a lot of men and women about what turned them on, what sort of images they would like to see. Men sort of got off on any kind of action, while the women enjoyed the sensuality, the details. So we tried to please them both. We just wanted to make the proper sex film.

Guys wanted action, girls wanted a nice esthetic? That's very telling. I guess you can't go wrong with gal-on-gal action, but why isn't there a man in the mix? I like looking at hot chicks make out as much as the next person, but I'd have appreciated a cute boy or two.

Well, we interviewed hundreds of blokes for the film, but they were all just the worst sort of people, like machines really. They would come in and say they could get off on cue, they could come on cue, and we were like, "Well, that's not the point." That's a machine.

And you'd already cast a machine. I find it hard to believe you couldn't find any clean, good-looking fellows to get into bed with those two girls.

They were all plastic pecs, really fucked-up, strange sort of men. I wasn't interested in that. The two women had a lot more fun. And it gave the machine a chance to come into play, because really the film is about the interface between women and their machines. I find that fascinating. That's where it relates to Add N to (X), where the relationship is between people and their machines, the human-machine interface. How man is sort of redundant. With the technology they've created they've actually made themselves quite redundant.

So do you feel like technology has emasculated men?

It doesn't necessarily emasculate. I think it changes the roles and changes the rules. I think what's interesting is that technology goes beyond gender and demands an asexual approach to it, or an ambisexual approach. It's interesting to me to study what's sort of beyond the grid of the machine. I think the orgasm is one of those areas, as well as sports and maybe the social interaction of the bar or club. Then it's interesting to take a look at how the machine is trying to co-opt those things.

So what's the next step of our sexual evolution then?

It seems like the evolution will be an internal rather than an external one. I think that's what happens when you decide yourself how you construct your new moral reality from the experiences that you go through. You need to develop that morality in this world now in order to cope with all that we've suddenly been exposed to via technology. God knows what will happen. I think that actually making the film challenged my own moral perception of things. It was a strange experience, it wasn't sexy at all to watch it or be part of it.

Why not?

I was involved, but because it was being filmed, there was a separation. It wasn't making love, but it also wasn't mechanistic. It was very odd. Meeting those people and setting up the situation was really fascinating. One of the women in the film is an M.A. in psychology and the other woman has been in hundreds of porn films in America. It was fascinating. It was a learning process. It's not the sort of thing one normally gets to do, unless they're lucky or drunk. Do you know what I mean? It was very odd indeed.

Well, what was your moral perception? Did you feel like because you had given them control of the cameras, had made them into the voyeurs, you might be protecting yourself from exploiting them? You were reversing the gaze.

What is the definition of exploitation? In that situation, those people are in control. They said that they felt like they weren't exploited. They're exploiting their own natural assets and they're paid really well for what they do. They set the charge, they set the limits. They tell you exactly what they want to do, what they don't want to do. It's all consensual. Obviously if it's in the hands of gangsters and it's illegal, then it would be a sort of slavery. It would be exploitative.

It's still about power. It's what you were saying earlier about structuring your own morality. Exploitation is a relative term.

It's a counterbalance between very libertarian ideas and conservative ideas, until you decide one way or another whether or not you get involved. It definitely is about male power, and has been. But the Internet destroys that notion by women who have the webcams in their rooms and embrace this exhibitionism. It's very difficult to place these things in a political context because it seems to have transgressed that. It seems to be much more about the individual rather than about the society. I don't necessarily believe in any real society anymore.

What do you believe in then? What's taking its place?

I don't know. I really wished I did 'cause I'd probably make some money out of it. I haven't a clue. Because my world exists among so many contradictions, from family to playing in a band to traveling the world, my view differs from a lot of other people's worldview. I don't think there's any longer a one-stop shop for your life philosophy.

The Internet causes fragmentation, but it also creates community. I mean, you're creating a community with your music, with this world you're offering with it. People respond to you and invariably respond to each other through you.

Electronic music is kind of either quasi-religious or is incredibly playful. The power of electronics is to use that technology over traditional instruments. You're trying to create sound worlds that have more of a relation to what your ear really hears. There's something about electronics that creates a specific universe that's outside of any kind of normal framework. That's what I'm interested in. Instead of trying to create a sort of utopia or perfect music, you just want to create a different kind of music, a different kind of world in relation to the normal world. Certain sounds have pictorial relationships. I love songs, I love singers, but I didn't want to make music that had at its center a human voice. The universe is populated by voices. But a musical universe is incredibly powerful. You can get lost in it.