Squarepusher × Z-MACHINES - Squarepusher × Z-MACHINES

What this video is

Produced in 2013 and released in early 2014, this video sits at the convergence of two distinct avant-garde traditions: Warp Records' long-running IDM lineage — represented by Tom Jenkinson (Squarepusher) — and Japan's emergent robotic performance art scene, spearheaded by the roboticists behind Z-MACHINES and visualised by Rhizomatiks' Daito Manabe. The Z-Machines project emerged from a 2013 challenge to build a…

Why it matters

A canonical text in the IDM and robotic performance art canon. The video is among the earliest high-production-value music films to foreground industrial robot musicians as sole performers, anticipating subsequent discourse around AI-generated music and non-human creativity. For Warp Records, it…

The director

Born in Tokyo in 1976, Daito Manabe studied mathematics at Tokyo University of Science and completed graduate education at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) in 2006. He co-founded Rhizomatiks that same year — a Tokyo-based creative…