Artist: Chicks on Speed
Title: Cutting The Edge
Format: 2-LP/2-CD
Label: Chicks on Speed Records (Germany)
Cat.no.: COSR 042
Release date: June 2009
Tracklist:
CD1/LP1:
01. Intro
02. Girl Monster
03. Art Rules
04. Art Speaks Out
05. Vibrator
06. Airport Connection
07. Buzz
08. Extended Paintbrush
09. Globo Cop
10. Sex In Der Stadt
11. Strip Song
CD2/LP2:
01. How To Build A High Heeled Shoe Guitar
02. Super Surfer Girl
03. Sewing Machine
04. Black And White Diva
05. Coolhunters
06. The Worst Band In The World
07. Scream Song
08. Art Rules Christopher Just's Hard One Intro
09. Art Rules Christopher Just's Hard One
10. Instrometalized
11. Sarah Baker makes partying into art
12. Cutting The Edge
13. Dangerous Ones (Hidden Track)
Press release notes from Chicks on Speed Records:
The Chicks have been busy in the last 2 years, filming video, making art installations, Girl Monster extravaganzas, reading books, exhibiting all over the planet, making patchwork fashion collections (for Insight, Crystal Ball and Yoox.com), building high heeled shoe guitars, high tech Super suits that trigger sound and video and other Objekt instruments ... AND THEY EVEN FOUND THE TIME TO MAKE THIS NEW RECORD!
CHICKS ON SPEED’s fifth album Cutting The Edge utilises the collective as a mechanism for the production of instantaneous sound and music recordings. The Chicks worked with: Whomadewho, Mark Stewart, Joe Robinson, A.L. Steiner, Kathi Glas, Anat Ben-David, Christopher Just, Fred Schneider, Gerhardt Potuznik, Patrick Pulsinger and especially UK Super producer team “A Scholar and Physician”.
The studios, where the album was made, included hotel rooms, trains, bathrooms in cellars of art galleries, over Skype and live recordings taken from their Art Rules performances @ MoMA and Centre Pompidou.
The songs range from self-referencing pieces, like “Art Rules” and “Extended Paintbrush”, full of insider information and irony, poking fun at the art world (to encourage people to be courageous and humorous) 60’s bubble gum pop “BUZZ”, which is all about the lost glamour of flying, Fassbinder inspired “Black and White Diva” featuring Kiki Moorse, who departed the group 2 years ago, to persue a solo career. “Sewing Machine” came about after the Chicks found a photo of themselves in El Pais crediting them as being Kraftwerk on stage. “Vibrator” ended up sounding so B52’s-ish that the Chicks just had to call up Fred Schneider. And yes, the recording happened over Skype.
The "Objekt Instruments" are the newest addiction the Chicks on Speed have, they’re the ultimate culmination of fashion, performance and wearable sculptural art, taking advantage of the latest technological developments in science and new media. Most of the songs on the album have been created by using the "Objekt Instruments"; amplified rocks, a high heeled shoe guitar, sax going through a guitar amp, plucking a gutted Piano, and the inspiration for the album title, the scissors.
Watch out for these "Objekt Instruments" handmade by the Chicks @ the new COS live shows and exhibitions the world over.
Oh and by the way, experimentalism has never sounded so Pop!
* Objekt Instruments made in conjunction with Hangar.org, Modul8, Christophe Coppins, Kampnagel theatre.
More Info/Media/EPK: www.chicksonspeed.com/cuttingtheedge.html (pw: chicksedge)
Booking: all European/Asian/Australian booking enquires: cris@primary.uk.com
All other enquires: management@chicksonspeed.com; organisation@chicksonspeed.com
P & C 2009 Chicks On Speed Records GmbH, Kolosseumstr. 6, 80469 München, Germany
CUTTING THE EDGE
Chicks on Speed are Melissa Logan and Alex Murray-Leslie who've conspired together since they ran their illegal bar together, behind the Munich Art Academy in the late 90s.You can try this at home. Sew these ingredients together and you got Chicks On Speed's happy white girl howling surprise of a fifth album, "Cutting The Edge":
1) Take a lot of art and heart and make it smart with catchy, scratchy melodies and pithy, echoey words that lacerate and negotiate the crazy state of human play. Primp and prep primary popping colors and lock them down with hooks that click tight, in saucy, defiant songs that spin you across the shiny dancefloors of your mind.
2) Make tunes that matter. Dramas and meditations in pop song form. Vibrator, whose B52's panache lured that band's Fred Schneider to join its sexy romp. Super Surfer Girls' funny beach fantasies; Art Rules Pop's scalding satire of art's money dance; Sew- ing Machine's found sounds from the sweatshop and inter-linguistic lyrics, the provocative textures of Extended Paint- brush's bouncy hedonistic agit-pop; the sheer provocation of Sex In Der Stadt's recycling porn ads; and the title track's timeless question - Are you fake? Or are you real?
3) Choose your collaborators wisely. You must trust them abso- lutely. We're talking serious threats like Mark Stewart; Anat Ben-David, Joe Robinson, Douglas Gordon, A.L. Steiner, Kathi Glas, Christopher Just, Fred Schneider, Gerhardt Potuznik, Patrick Pulsinger and especially UK Super producer team A Scholar and Physician.
4) Work across nations and oceans with tools like Skype and OBJEKT instruments you make yourself - amplified rocks, guitars like stiletto heels, saxophone warbling through guitar amps, piano strings plucked by hand.
5) Wear your own designs of "super suits" that trigger sound and video, made of futuristic textiles with ancient cat's eyes that see into the present.
6) Let a smorgasbrod of symbols slash expectations as you smash the grey part- itions between art, fashion, music, museums, government, industry and the way you choose to live your life & dreams.
7) Don't forget the scissors, just as effective as a big bass drum, cutting you off from what you want to leave behind and giving this record its name.
8) Add a dash of heartbreak, hilarity and wicked insight.
9) Record on the run, in hotel rooms, trains, bathrooms in cellars of global art galleries, over Skype and live on stage at Art Rules performances at MOMA in New York and the Centre Pompidiou in Paris.
10) Keep stitching. The departure of Kiki Moore after their last album two years ago, caused soul-searching. Would the Chicks survive? But COS's exuberant art needs kept them flinging their own glitter. Feel it? It's our time to shine. Fuck off, vampires, it's too late.
by Vivien Goldman
Vivien Goldman is a writer, broadcaster and musician whose post-punk cult classic 'Launderette' is re-issued on COS's Girl Monster. Her fifth book is The Book of Exodus: the Making and Meaning of Bob Marley and the Wailers' Album of the Century. Known as The Punk Professor, she also teaches Reggae courses at NYU and writes for the New York Times, the New Statesman, the Observer and many more.
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