(A similar version in inky gray wool had to be made on an older, gentler machine that takes three times as long).
"We got a thousand points of light For the homeless man We got a kinder, gentler, Machine gun hand We got department stores and toilet paper Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer Got a man of the people, says keep hope alive Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive.
Just before a climactic chase scene, composer Andrzej Korzynski lets loose the kind of gentle drum machine rhythm and neon-tinged electro synth lines that wouldn't sound out of place banging out of clubs in the few years following the film's 1981 release.
Biffy sign off with the gentle, acoustic "Machines" and the roaring crowd-pleaser "The Captain".
Its origins signalled a theatrical quality that a swelling cast, including the Reverend Al Sharpton, has managed to sustain; an Off Broadway production (backlit oak tree, gentle wind machines, soliloquies about past and present) seems inevitable.
Yes, there is a lot of wallowing and moping, but the backing music, which ranges from gentle drum-machine beats to swelling orchestration, allows the songs to transcend self-pity.
And as several recent papers including one this week in Science by Hagan Bayley, a chemical biologist at Oxford University show, this approach is evolving fast.The first of these papers, published in Biofabrication on February 4th by Wenmiao Shu of Heriot-Watt University, in Edinburgh, described a machine gentle enough to print human embryonic stem cells in a distinct pattern.
No matter how gentle your washing machine is, it is still too rough for beachwear.
From the sidewalk there is a constant, gentle murmur of machines beyond the great windows.
