El Aviador Dro’s playful techno sensibility dates back to a time when electronic music meant Devo and Kraftwerk, and keyboards and jerky dance moves and chirpy tunes, and messing around with the idea that industrial progress was going to see us all turn into robots. Their songs have titles like, “Nuclear Sí”, “La Televisión Es Nutriva”, and “Amor Industrial”, while the band members answer to sci-fi nicknames: Nexus, Sincotrón, ATAT, X. El Aviador Dro “landed its spaceship in a vineyard outside of Madrid” in 1978; they scheduled their first U.S. tour earlier this year. The inlay doesn’t tell us any more than that, so if you want to know which albums the tracks in this retrospective have been taken from, or where they sit in the band’s history, then bad luck, y’know? I’m guessing that “La Cuidad En Movimiento”, with its bursts of trumpets, came somewhere in the ‘80s, and the spookier density of “Antimateria” belongs more to the ‘90s, and the live tracks (which rock, incidentally) are recent, but that’s just an assumption. Oh well. Never mind. Whether you know their history or not, they’re still a fun band.

• "Nuclear Si" MP3
• "Amor Industrial" MP3