After last week saw the end of a lull in my Tuesday Ten postings, I’m hoping this month to actually do one each week. This week’s was inspired by the mention on Popjustice (complete with sample) of Röyksopp‘s forthcoming single The Girl and The Robot, which appears to be something of a rather brilliant pop song, and then there was the timely, but too late for me, showing of I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK last night, a film I still haven’t seen.

Needless to say, this week’s is about robots.

A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me, or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

Where else to start but with two crazy French guys who only appear in shiny outfits with enormous robot helmets in public, provide reputedly one of the greatest live shows in existence, and have a track called Robot Rock? Somehow taking elements of the future-past in all their influences, and for over a decade now have been leading the way in showing the future for commercial house music, perhaps. It remains one of my biggest musical regrets that I never saw these guys, particularly on the Alive 2007 tour. Either way, I’m not sure you can get much closer to people wanting to be robots in the public eye than these guys.

By no means the only track this band did involving robots, but this is most certainly the most notorious – particularly it’s not worksafe in a billion years video. Don’t let the graphic animated sex in the video distract you, though – this is a fantastic bit of retro-electronics, about, well, getting your kicks with a robot.

Talking of cyber-fetishism, this video perhaps took the ideal to whole new levels. The song itself is nothing to do with robots – according to the astoundingly detailed Björk website it’s actually about re-discovering the joys of spring – but the video is rightly remembered probably just as much as the song. Chris Cunningham turned this track into an even more sensual and elegant feast by adding the infamous video that features the construction and then falling in love of two Björk-bots. Frankly one of the best videos ever made, even if it is a little unsettling, perhaps.

Still with sex with mechanical things, then there is Amanda Palmer’s rather marvellous use of mechanics as a metaphor – in that she would prefer a mechanical boyfriend rather than a “real” one, as it would appear that she has a habit of, er, breaking them.

There is no shortage of industrial artists writing songs about becoming robots, cyborgs, or simply being robots. However, I have other tracks to cover, so I’ll have to have just a couple of industrial tracks here. First one? An old Die Krupps album track, detailing the reasoning behind shedding an imperfect human form and becoming a machine, to a stomping, driving metallic industrial rhythm: Weakness: these days are over / Old flesh: replaced by shiny armour

And the second one? Probably one of my favourite FLA tracks – actually, scratch that, one of my favourite industrial tracks, period – this is one of the few slower-paced FLA tracks I can think of. It seems to be creating a nightmarish idea of being a robot, being a slave to someone, or something else, sounds creepy as fuck and is fucking amazing live.

I’ve never even pretended to understand what the fuck Wayne Coyne is on about most of the time, and as his band’s career has continued closer and closer to the mainstream, I’m sure it’s getting harder than ever. Needless to say, fuck knows why Yoshimi is saving us from the pink robots. Either way, it’s mad, pretty-much-incomprehensible but bloody marvellous at the same time.