Nirvana and "alt rock" were supposed to be the death knell for stadium, shredding cock rock, but if you've seen a Camaro being washed you know that they didn't kill anything. While it's still commonplace enough in 2013 to put on a sleeveless t-shirt and feel the noize, the zombies of the '90s have arrived to finish the job.Engineers at Tokyo University have built a robotic band that shreds so fast it leaves Van Halen flailin' and drums so hard it makes a John Henry out of John Bonham. Perhaps my favorite, most retro-future aspect of Z-Machines is that they're sponsored by Zima, the Crystal Pepsi of beers that hasn't been sold in America since 2008, but apparently lives on in Japan.The guitarist, Mach, has 78-fingers and in one video played at 1,184 beats per minute. Cosmo plays the keyboards while lasers shoot out of his eyes, and the drummer, Ashura keeps the beat—no, destroys the beat—with 21 drumsticks. Presumably after the show, they all do lines of keyboard cleaner off of cell phone groupies. The Daily Mail has pictures of Z Machines greeting the public at Tokyo's Maker Faire today.For all of their acumen, in performance they still look sort of look sort of static, like the Showbiz Pizza band rendered hairless after a fire. They don't even write their own songs—although luminaries no less notable than Squarepusher have written pieces for them.But Z-Machines don't need your puny human approval. Their engineers are going to try to get Z-Machines into space.From a cold and rational perspective (the only kind Z-Machines accept), it's an impressive feat of engineering—if a robot can shred a double guitar so capably, they'll be able to perform surgery or other tasks even better than the human hand in the future. But from my fallible, limited personal perspective, the most impressive thing is that Zima is still being sold anywhere.
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