Robot Roulette

Music EN ↓ 4 episodes

Two indie musicians feed their original songs into an AI and react to whatever comes back. Mark O'Brien and Phil McGovern wrote these songs. They did not write what AI does to them. Each episode, they pick one of their originals, generate AI covers in random genres from a roulette wheel, and listen together for the first time. Sometimes it's brilliant. Sometimes it's deeply wrong. But the first-time reaction is always genuine. New episodes drop monthly. Ad-free episodes and FLAC downloads of every cover available on Patreon.

Author

Robot Roulette

Episodes

"Two Words Away" by Phil McGovern 02.06.2026 2:54:59

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...

"Moving to Silence" by Mark O'Brien 02.05.2026 3:09:20

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...

"That Day" by Phil McGovern 02.04.2026 2:15:12

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...

"Death of Cafmo" by Phil McGovern 01.03.2026 2:50:47

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...