Robot Roulette

Episode 4 of Robot Roulette features one of Phil's best songs, "Two Words Away." With an odd time signature and influences that range from Depeche Mode to Sonic Youth, it almost sounds like a hard sell, but "Two Words Away" is an incredibly approachable electronic rock song with a great hook and genre shifts that were ahead of their time. Released in 2007 under the Smothere...

Episode 3 of Robot Roulette features the first experiment written and recorded by Mark, the 2012 energetic alt-rock track "Moving to Silence.""Moving to Silence" features a sarcastic lyric written from the point of view of the other person in one of Mark's former romantic relationships. The title comes from a self-help book Mark had the displeasure of reading where the auth...

Episode 2 of Robot Roulette features another song from Phil, this time released twice for two different projects in drastically different styles. Phil's beautiful early-2000s ballad "That Day" is about longing after loss, and was originally imagined as acoustic guitar and vocals only. But during the late-2000s Smothered in Argyle project, it was reimagined as a faster, louder emo-pun...

On this first episode, we're looking at Phil McGovern's mid-2000s quirky, idiosyncratic song "Death of Cafmo." But before we make any covers, we need to tell everyone how we got here. Mark and Phil discuss the origins of Mark's early experiments with Udio, which resulted in a meme for Mark's lost media hunting show Is This Anything?, and the story of a fateful night in No...