April 2001 • Rockbites Alternative Daily
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April 2001 • Rockbites Alternative Daily
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Chicks On Speed live in San Francisco 20 April 2001
With a super cheesy computer voice insistently announcing their name in rumbling machine gun monotone, with black light bathing the stage while an indecipherable home video played against the mostly black back wall (a sheet had been hung, so a small square of the image was clear), Munich, Germany based techno-art trio Chicks On Speed—dressed mostly in blinding white and fluorescent Day-Glo—took their places 1, 2, 3 in front of a small but enthusiastic and very colorful audience last night at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. It was their first time in California, their first ever North American tour. Onstage to the left: the tall blonde Australian (30 year old Alex Murray-Leslie) with hyper-glamour blush, lipstick, and eye shadow. In the center: the brunette New Yorker (30 year old Melissa Logan) done up like a four-year-old’s dolly, fresh from a best-try makeover with magic markers, her lipstick two poorly aligned rectangular bars of red—and wearing a Day-Glo orange belt consisting of the word 'KLINK!' upside down and backwards. On the right: the Munich native (34 year old Kiki Morse), a tranced-out female harlequin with dark 1,000 yard eyes and burning cheeks. Having met a few years ago in Munich with various connections to the city’s School Of Art, CoS began as a one-off multimedia installation and has evolved, with help of friend and producer Tobi Neuman, into one of the more interesting avant-garde touring acts of the last several years. With their self-referential and recursive irony (viz: their song We Don’t Play Guitars, featuring excellent metal guitar samples, in which their mockery of a genre becomes one with reveling in it), their surrealist-cum-dadaist approach to performance, and their keen musical sensibilities, a Chicks On Speed show is your basic, complete mind fuck. And thank God for that—there is oh so precious little of it these days. CoS played many of the tracks off their current album The Re-releases Of The Un-releases, the 33-track remix/rehash/resort of their debut LP featuring remixes by Ramon Bauer (Mego) and Gerhard Potuznik (Cheap, Mego, Breakin, IT). The show’s few technical difficulties just became part of the event, which was adrenalizing, fascinating, confusing, mind-expanding... but more than anything it was pure punk rock and roll fun. Deadpanning Cracker’s Eurotrash Girl against an agressively sterile CoS electrobeat, Melissa warped the words (turns out she stole a Jaguar, not that someone broke in her car) and explained afterwards “That used to be a country song.” Uh... right. Midway through the show, when the mostly bemused audience seemed in need of a clue, Alex jumped down off the stage and showed us how to have a good time, arms up, dancing her way through the tightly packed people and giving one very surprised guy a vigorous, double-handed squeeze on the ass (no, it was not me, dammit). Beyond playing gigs, the trio design clothes & print-based graphics, make videos, and have created multimedia art installations in Israel, Germany, France, and the US. Their new show Design 21 opens in New York city next month. Last night’s CoS San Francisco performance garners five bites out of five. Rockbites ratings 5: life changing, 4: stunning, 3: captivating, 2: amusing, 1: annoying. Here are Chicks On Speed’s remaining US dates April 21-22 - Los Angeles (Knitting Factory) 23 - Portland (Crystal Ballroom) 24 - Olympia (Club Thekla) 25 - Seattle (Crocodile Cafe) | Chicks On Speed | | COS on K Records | | fan site | | Turn Of The Century (full length MP3) | | bio | | discography | | sample | | CD | | top of page | |
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