“Humans Suck. We Need To Die.” An Interview with JBOT, The Braniac Behind Captured! By Robots

What do you do when you’re a misanthrope who can’t find bandmates who 1) know how to play, and 2) aren’t strung out on some mysterious substance? Jay Vance, also known as JBOT, decided that the only possible solution was to build robots to take their place. Duh.

Unfortunately for JBOT, he made his bots a little too smart. They revolted, implanting his head with a chip and forcing him to spread their message of the impending doom of humanity by means of aggressive, noisy, extreme music. To this day, he’s a slave to the machines, leading to the rise of the grindcore etc. outfit Captured! By Robots.

DRMBOT 0110 and GTRBOT666 were kind enough to let me chat with JBOT in the midst of their North American tour. We discuss dog bites, authenticity, rabbits, and the inferiority of the human race. Proceed with caution.

In the time that you’ve been doing Captured! By Robots, there’s been a pretty drastic transition from the comedic novelty stuff to a much darker place. What spurred that change, and how has your audience reacted?

I don’t think it’s because I’m getting older. I think it’s because I see the world falling the part, and it kills me. I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and before, I felt I wasn’t saying anything, that nothing I was doing had any importance except for being stupid and silly. I don’t think I’m going to have a headstone, ’cause I’ll probably die in a big plague and they’ll just dump the bodies in mass graves — but if I WAS going to be buried and have a headstone, I’d want it to say that I fucking spoke my mind and did something good.

I went through hell the last couple years I was in Captured! By Robots the way it used to be. I was looking for something else, and I couldn’t find it.  I just kept looking and trying new things, and nothing worked. I ended up quitting because I couldn’t figure it out. I did a couple shows trying new shit, and halfway through the third show I realized I wasn’t having any fun the whole time. I was like “that’s it, I’m out, I quit”.

When something loses its ability to be enjoyable, you lose your direction and you don’t know where to go, you’ve just gotta fucking bail. You can’t keep banging your head against the wall when nothing is working. And it was the best thing I ever did, because I came back with these new ideas that I’m super proud of. Every night I speak my horrible opinions, and even if people don’t like it, at least I’m sharing. And the robots have gotten waaaayyy better. Sometimes I look at them and smile, thinking “I can’t believe you’re the same robot I built 20 years ago.”

Yeah, you’ve basically been doing this for longer than I’ve been alive.

Wow, I’m getting old. But it’s weird, because I’m happy with it — being a single dude in a van at a rest area touring with robots. Whatever it takes. I’m the oldest person at a lot of these shows with the younger bands. A lot of people don’t like grindcore, but we’re doing all sorts of stuff. Grindcore, sludge, thrash, and all sorts of other weird shit. It’s just so fulfilling, the feeling of power you get from that shit. It hammers so hard. It hulk smashes everything.

It’s awesome that you were able to get your heart back into it after your hiatus.

Yeah, it’s finally become a band that I’m very proud of. I’m so happy with it. It’s been wonderful. It’s good to not hate what you’re doing, and for a couple years, I was hating that shit. I felt so lost, because who do you talk to? I tried to talk to all my friends asking what I should do. Nobody could give me that answer. So you just have to figure it out.

Luckily, with some time and reflection, I realized what it would take. And I’m coming back. Each tour I keep adding new shit, making it more heavy and more aggressive, changing stuff up. So it’s been really fun to listen to the development. Even from 2017 until now is very different. Much more growly and angry. It’s great.

Do you have some sort of theme with this tour?

Not really. I guess my only theme right now is “Humans suck. We need to die.” I kind of got rid of doing the themes that I did before, like The Ten Commandments Tour, and The Get Fit with Captured By Robots Tour. I may do something like that again, but for now I’m having a lot of fun just being me and not wearing a mask, just having a good time.

With this tour, we did that video with DRMBOT doing a 600 BPM blastbeat, and since it got so much attention, all these drummers were talking shit and saying they could kick her ass. So, just for fucks, I challenged drummers to come to our show and see if they have what it takes to compete with DRMBOT. I made a drum set out of garbage cans and there’s an open call to the stage every night to see if anyone wants to take up the challenge. It’s silly and it’s been a lot of fun. My friend Lev Weinstein from Krallice made some epic sounds with that garbage can set. It sounded so good.

Authenticity and the willingness to have fun will take you a long way. A lot of people in this realm of music like to hide behind this totally br00tal character they’ve created, so it’s cool that you’re trying to turn that around.

I’ve always been JBOT, I’m still JBOT, and I’m going to be forever. Every day I’m setting up the bots, and breaking them down. I don’t see how people can keep a character like that running if they’re actually speaking about something that’s important. It’s really hard to picture some guy that’s a real fuckin’ hard frontman talking about serious shit with that persona. Then again, I don’t understand a lot of metal. We’re really not metal — we do some metal shit, but we’re more grindcore, anti-fascist, anti-racist punk than metal. But we like sick riffs.

***Abrupt subject change***

I got bit by a dog the other day. It was my friend’s dog. It got me through the pants. It went through the pocket, so it wasn’t able to actually sink its teeth into me, but I’ve got a hand sized bruise. It’s so fuckin’ gross.

That’s why I like bunnies. Bunnies aren’t going to chomp you up, bunnies don’t stink. I actually take care of elderly rescue rabbits. Our new music video, called “Debt To Be Paid” is about rescuing shelter animals. You should watch it! A bunch of my dead pets come back to life.

My bunny, Big Noodle, is a great actor. He plays dead, and people are like “Awe, it’s so sad. Did he die?” Psych, he’s just acting. Bunnies like to flop. If they’re feeling comfortable, they’ll just flop onto their side. They try to manipulate people. It’s like body language. Big Noodle does the manipulating, too. He’s so smart. He knows which buttons to push to get people to love him. We filmed him doing the flop, and then we put some big felt “X”s on his eyes, like they do in cartoons.

The song is about rescuing animals, and then they die. I’m really tired of digging holes for my pets. But that’s the nature of rescue — you don’t know how long they’ll be around for.

How long have you been doing animal rescue? That’s adorable.

About 10 years. I have a medical foster rabbit right now who needs medicine three times a day. I also have my little girl, Lily, she’s 11 or 12. And she’s got her little boy, who is the star of that music video. People don’t really get rabbits — they think they’re dumb like gerbils, but they’re just like dogs. People think they’re mean because they keep them in cages all day. They’re meant to run, and if you keep them in a cage they’re gonna be pissed off. It’s like a jail cell. It’s the worst. I’ve learned so much about rabbits, and now I’m a total rabbit advocate. They don’t bite like dogs.

Besides the rabbits, do you have any other random hobbies?

Oh yeah, I do a lot of weird shit, but the main thing is that I work with two-stroke engines. I build fast ’70s style mopeds. I re-engineer them and make them into something that they should’ve never been, welding parts onto them, rebuilding engines and changing stuff up.

I actually competed in a race that went from Seattle down into San Diego, and it was seven days on a moped. It was the best time of my life, just touring with no robots. There were fifty people doing it. It was just insane. Everything was timed, and when you got to the end spot for the day, you had to check in with some sort of fuckin’ app.

But yeah, I really like building shit you can ride. With motorcycles, you’re kind of limited in what you can do, because the engines are so big and they’re already so powerful. But with a moped, you only start with about two horsepower, and if you can make it do 15 horsepower, which is very doable, that’s amazing. Just by sheer will alone, it’s the coolest thing in the world.

So that’s one of my other hobbies, but I really think I can do anything. I don’t mean to be immodest, but for some reason I was blessed with the ability to figure anything out if I want it. I think a lot of other people have it, but they just don’t believe it or pursue it. Learning is the most amazing thing. My favorite thing in the world is learning to experience. Making mistakes is like “well, I learned a whole lot of stuff from that,” and then I try not to make the same mistake again… which I usually do anyway, but I try not to. Once you understand that mistakes are awesome, it frees you from so much bullshit.

Did you know anything about robotics when you started Captured! By Robots?

I didn’t know jack. I just started it because I had to. I came up with some concepts of what would and wouldn’t work, but I didn’t really know for sure. I just pursued it and allowed the mistakes to happen.

The first thing I made was a guitar playing robot, because I couldn’t find a guitar player to save my life. It was a slide guitar, mostly just a noise maker. But then I started having problems with my drummer, he was making me nuts. So I decided I’d just make a robot drummer too. I made some pedals with some bicycle brake cable coming out of them that ran to the drums, which had hinges on them with sticks and springs to hold them up. So I’d basically be running the set from these pedals to make the drums play. That was the beginning of it.

And the rest is history.

Yeah, I just didn’t give up, just kept hammering at it. We got really popular for a while, and it was really fun. But once the money started coming in and I started thinking I was something special, then everything got too easy and I lost interest. That was the beginning of the descent. I think if I get acceptance, then I hate it. I’m built to suffer, that’s what I realized. I have a song about it on my tour, called “Suffer,” ’cause it’s the only thing I’m really good at.

I’m not sick on this tour, but every other fuckin’ tour I’ve been on, I got sick for the whole damn tour. And I’d just suffer, rolling with it even though I can’t breathe, boogers coming out everywhere. It’s disgusting. Though I learned some tricks to kind of keep that from happening. I think the hurricane blew all the pollen away from here, which might be why I haven’t gotten sick this tour. So that’s good.

But yeah. There’s something to be said for people that can suffer, because nothing can stop you if you know how to suffer. Just fuckin’ do it, roll with the punches, take everything that life gives, and keep coming back. I think more people should suffer more. There’s a nobility in suffering.

Life sucks and then you die.

I see some bad shit coming for humanity, and I try to share that every night, telling people to live for the day. Because we’re on a precipice right now, and shit could go really bad, really quick. Faster than we’re used to. It’s gonna come at us so hard, and there’s gonna be nobody to turn to.

I hate to be that guy, but I’m that guy now. Sharing the good word of the apocalypse. If there was ever a good time to be thinking the apocalypse is coming, now is the time, man. The end is nigh. There’s too many fuckin’ people. Everyone wants to have a little mini-me without thoughts of the consequences: watching them suffer when bullshit hits. That’s why I don’t have any kids, because I don’t want to watch them go through that. The bunnies, on the other hand, are gonna die anyway.

Do you have any new music on the way?

I wrote a bunch of new shit for this tour, and I was gonna record a new album, but I couldn’t do it because I didn’t have enough money. It’s okay, though, because people that come to the shows are loving the new stuff.

I’m doing all sorts of experiments with thrash. I’ve recently learned that GTRBOT has the incredible capacity to go “digga-da digga-da digga-da” super fuckin’ fast. It’s really clean, and it just fits. If you throw in a thrash beat behind it, fuck, bring on the circle pit. It feels so good! I was never really a thrash guy before, but I was talking with my booking agent, and he was like “You can do anything you want with this shit. It’s all still gonna sound like you.” So, I’m mixing up styles, and I’m trying some shit that’s a little weirder. I love Dystopia a lot with how they added all this weird shit to stuff, yet it works so well. They’re an inspiration to try things that I usually wouldn’t try, as long as it fits.

Oh yeah, so I was talking about recording. I didn’t have any money, but I had a motorcycle that I’d gotten for free, so I sold it and made some money. Now I can get a laptop when I get home and build a little studio to record my own shit, because I don’t have enough money to keep spending on one-shot recording. I figure I know enough people who can help me with mastering and stuff. So hopefully, I’ll have something new out in the spring.

I also have a new robot band coming up called Teddy Bear Orchestra. It’s a bunch of teddy bears that play music, and I’m a horrible German conductor that hates bears. It’s a play on good vs. evil. And the bots play pretty good! It’s a real spectacle, and I think it could sell really well. It’s good for kids and adults. Captured! By Robots is giving me my integrity right now, so I feel like I can do stupid shit again with a different band.

Sounds like you’re back and better than ever.

It’s going really great. The response to this tour has been fantastic. People are telling me it’s the craziest thing they’ve ever seen, and I’m really grateful. I just need to spread the word about this shit, because I’m so proud of it now. I hate everything, but I like my band now. I’m a real hard sell on liking shit, so if I like it, there’s gotta be other people that will too.

Touring as a headliner when you’re still underground can be really difficult, because people don’t really know who you are. You hammer your fuckin’ head against the wall to get exposure, but it’s limited. I think I need to start doing support on tours with other bands. We have a couple shows set up with Mac Sabbath and Ghoul, so hopefully those crowds will be interested in a little dystopian awfulness. I think it’ll work.

If any bands read this and they’re looking for a crazy grindcore sludge robot opening band, give me a call! We could fit with a million different bands — we have punk aspects, metal aspects, thrash aspects. It’s just a matter of those folks seeing us and maybe wanting to take us up. No pressure, but it would be nice. I’ll warm up the crowd for you, bb ;)

Catch Captured! By Robots on tour throughout the next month: