Walk into the Light

New York City hip-hop group Automato is Alex Frankel, Ben Fries, Jesse Levine, Nick Millhiser, Andrew Raposo, and Morgan Wiley. Completed in January of 2003, their debut album was produced by James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy of the DFA. The band's goal was to make an album that sounds and feels like the sample-based hip-hop records they love, but captures their un-hip-hop band element of the group. And they succeeded beyond even their own expectations. The vocals are somewhere between Cannibal Ox, Andre 3000, Jay Z, and Ghostface, while the beats recall a mid-nineties Pete Rock remix of Talking Heads covering Kraftwerk. A totally new kind of hip-hop.