Due to popular demand, we’ve bundled all the Beat Room products into one foot-tapping, happy-slapping, neighbour-bothering, mosh-pit-surfing Beat Combo. Buy the whole room and save two quid! Check out the shop for details.

Also, there’s a competition afoot to win a copy of Whatever We’re Releasing Next Week. Simply solve Mongo’s riddle and send us the answer. Whatever It Is could be yours for free! Here are the details:


This coming Friday, Rhythmic Robot will be releasing another way-cool instrument for you. (How do we do it? The answer, folks, is caffeine-loaded energy drinks, on the hour, every hour.) But this time, for a bit of fun -- and hopefully to whip up a frenzy of anticipation ahead of the release -- we’re going to taunt / tantalise you with a little competition.

It’s simple. Mongo has composed one of his dreaded Odes, only this time in the form of a riddle. Answer to the riddle = hefty great clue as to the name of the product we’re releasing next week. And the first person to answer the riddle correctly, with a brief and persuasive rationale as to how they got to the answer, gets a copy of Whatever It Is for free, plus any other product from our lineup that they want. Tempting, huh?

The only rule is that you use the Contact Us form on our website to send your answers in. This is fairly obviously a cunning ploy to get you on our mailing list so we can let you know about further Cool New Products in the future. Hopefully that’s a small price to pay. But if you really, really don’t want to be on the mailing list, just say so in your entry and we promise we won’t add you. Really. (But then you’ll miss out...)

As entries come in I’ll post them below (anonymously, don’t worry) so you can laugh at what other people are thinking, and hone your answers. And if everybody gets it straight off, I’ll have Mongo flogged. Good luck!


MONGO’S ODE

That ancient swift-winged messenger
The daughter of the light
Who onetime paced across the sky
And sang dispatches from on high
Her footsteps burning bright

Now joins the swiftest from below
In reckless wondrous dance
And tattoo’d patterns weaving round
Keep step with vaults of pulsing sound
Infusing their romance

The taste of this forbidden love
Is nectar to the bold
And sampling each forbidden bite
They dance away along the light
Toward their hidden gold.

Best wishes, The Professor

We’d like to write you all a love letter, straight from our heart. And we’d like to type it on a vintage wide carriage Imperial typewriter, so that you can’t trace who we are. To celebrate Valentine’s Day we’re releasing Typewriter, a fun little weirdness sampled from Mongo’s precious Imperial. Typewriters are scary. Don’t believe us? Try typing this:

He is innocent.

Did that ’t’ jump? IT DID????!! Then RUN! Get out of that house! GO GO GO!!! See? Scary. Or this:

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Try that one a few times and before you know it dead guys will be mixing you drinks and suggesting you kill your family for the sake of an upmarket B&B.

Meanwhile, Mongo and I have been celebrating Valentine’s day by spring cleaning the lab. The result is a slightly revamped website, with our instruments in what we hope are moderately easier-to-navigate categories. We don’t want to make things too easily understandable, because getting lost in a big spooky castle is fun and character-building; but the newly painted signs for Beat Room, Keyboard Vault, Laboratory and Mongo’s Cupboard should at least get you back on the right path if you wander off.

Lots of love, The Professor

What an exciting few weeks it’s been here in the castle laboratory. Hand-wired Kontakt instruments have been flying out the reinforced gates just as fast as Mongo can solder them together, and we’ve been hugely cheered by your emails and comments. It’s time to share that love now, and get the instruments that weren’t quite ready for the website launch buffed, charged up and posted. So say hello to Doctor 55, Magnus and StyloDrum! We hope you like them.

It’s been very interesting to hear, through the front page poll or through comments, what you think we should be concentrating on next. The consensus seems to be that you’d like some more home-grown weirdness. We can promise you that that is DEFINITELY on the way. But we’ve also been scrounging our way round car-boot sales on the lookout for bargains. (It reminds Mongo of his graverobbing days.) The fruits of this are also on the test bench and will be with you over the next couple of months: current favourites (giving as little as possible away here) include a genuine classic of a bygone era, plus a little-known but liquid-nitrogen-level cool denizen of the lower-frequency depths. Watch this space…

Do keep in touch and let us know what floats your boat. We always listen, and sometimes we even obey!

Best wishes, The Professor