Photograph by Becky Digiglio

A music man and his machine: Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra’s SPO-20 and Professor B. Miller

Problems in Modern Puppetry Performance : When SDSU English department grad and tech geek Michael Buchmiller turned himself into Professor B. Miller of the Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra, he knew he’d face challenges in the songwriting, recording, releasing, and performing departments. One thing he didn’t foresee: the increasing difficulty of keeping his singing robot SPO-20, which uses vocal software particular to Windows XP, operational. (Support for the system ended 2014, to say nothing of the software itself.) “Oh it’s a nightmare,” confesses the Professor, who grew up in Chicago before heading to sunnier San Diego climes in 1996. “In my mind, the software I started using in 1996 is our robot’s voice. Using any other software is unfortunately unthinkable to me. But the company that made it went out of business, probably around the same time we started using it, so it hasn’t been supported for decades. I can’t install it on a modern computer, so I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get it to work. I run a virtual version of Windows XP on my modern PC, and then have the text-to-speech software installed on that.”

Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra Surf the Web

Buchmiller took musical inspiration from Faith No More’s The Real Thing, the first album he ever bought. Supplementing that soon after with Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine, he cannonballed himself into a pool of tunes. “I loved Kraftwerk, heavy metal, and industrial music. I also loved novelty records and Dr. Demento. Some of the popular acts from the 1980s spoke to me, like Devo, the B-52’s, Huey Lewis and the News, and Talking Heads. My family headed out to San Diego for spring break in the early 1990s. That’s when I heard Rocket From the Crypt, and they quickly became my favorite band. I still love everything that John Reis does. Shortly after that, I started getting into punk and ska.”

He found he wasn’t satisfied with simply listening. “When I moved out to San Diego, I started a music magazine and was going to shows three or four nights a week, interviewing bands, writing reviews. Then when I got to SDSU, I was music director at their student-run radio station, KCR. Listening to hundreds of bands each week in every imaginable genre definitely warped my mind. Over time, I was drawn towards weirder and weirder stuff. The more unusual it was, the more it stood out from the pile of predictable songs. Skeleton Key made an album where their drum kit was made from a bunch of pots and garbage cans. I was obsessed. Xerophonics put out an album entirely comprised of layered recordings of Xerox copy machines. It was amazing. sElf [the band] made a record called Gizmodgery, created exclusively using sounds from toys. So weird, but it’s incredibly catchy.”

The new Satanic Puppeteer album is called Surf The Web, a jokey swirl of surf music and online life. SPO-20’s robot voice presides over such catchy, fresh ditties as “Let Me Guess Your Password,” “Gone Phishing,” and “Six Reasons Why Clickbait Titles Actually Work.” Although local performances are anticipated, gigs don’t come easy for this ensemble. “When we perform live, it’s quite a production. In addition to the 6-foot 4-inch metal robot and all of my gear, we also bring our own lights and our custom built ‘Perform-O-Tron’ that serves in part as a video projector. We have videos paired with each of the songs, with custom closed captions that may or may not also have other things going on in them.” It’s a layered multi-media performance.

An additional complication: “I have very little interest in doing the same thing over and over again, so every show is something new. There was a time where we would play two or three times a year, but when the pandemic hit, we sort of paused that and focused on recording and releasing new albums. At this point, we’ve put out six or seven albums since our last show. When we start playing again, every show is going to have to be an album release show, just to try and catch up. I don’t know exactly when we’ll start performing again, but we haven’t played our last show just yet. The master plan calls for 20 albums, each with a different theme.”

So far, the band is around halfway there. “Currently, we are recording themed album number eleven, Press Start, a videogame-themed album done entirely in chiptune/8-bit sounds from old video games. Once we have the songs done, I’m going to try to figure out how to make a Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra playable video game that features songs from our album as the soundtrack.”