DJ SET OF THE WEEK: RADIO SCOTVOID

You find yourself standing in the living room in your terrycloth robe. It’s quite late, and you can’t remember why you’re holding this glass of red wine. But you do remember the beeping.

Beep, boop brweeerrrrreeee, buzzzzzz, brinnnng, ZZZzzzzZZZZnnnnnggggg, bloopdedooboop.

You look around the room. There’s the kids’ Game Boy. There’s the fax machine. There’s that old synthesizer you found in the basement by the curtains. There’s the DVD player.

Suddenly you remember why you came down here. For a moment – as you were lying in bed, feeling terribly alone, as you have the past few days – you heard something. You heard something in the ambient buzz of electronics that you normally block out. It wasn’t just a high-pitched whine like the television makes, so close do being out of audible range.

No – it was a message.

“Come down” they said (“boopbevrrrrrrnbeeeep”), “we can make you whole again. We can make it all so much better. You don’t have to be alone anymore.”

You remember this. And you take off the robe.

The idea of making love to a machine is an old one. Though sexy robots are a dime a dozen now (from Austin Powers to Heineken ads), the concept has been with us for as long as we’ve had machines with holes in them, and probably longer (or if you’re otherwise inclined and/or otherwise equipped, machines with pointy-outy-parts). The Futurists dreamed of a procreation machine as early as the 1910s. If anyone took the time to read all of De Sade, I suspect you’d find the idea is much older than that.

Still, there’s something downright touching about the kind of electronics-love that Radio Scotvoid finds in genres like chiptune, skweee and 8-bit. It seems that loving your electronics does not necessarily mean being an ungenerous lover – you can poke and prod and tweak things, and somehow in the process, learn to make those electronics sing lovingly to you in their own voices. He makes love to the machine, and lets the machine be itself.

He’ll be at the Good Life tonight @ 9pm.

Go learn to be a better lover.

[F Nice's 8-Bit Showcase. Good Life. 28 Kingston St., Boston. 617.451.2622. 9pm/21+/free. goodlifebar.com]