Chicks don't techno for an answer

By REBECCA BARRY

Six years ago three young art students struggling to pay their fees opened an illegal bar in Munich. When surges of young, hip, like-minded people came to drink, chat, check out the music and absorb the atmosphere, the owners realised their potential as a group and outgrew their original goals.

Instead, Alex Murray-Leslie of Sydney, a jewellery designer, artist Melissa Logan of New York and fashion stylist Kiki Moorse of Munich, started Chicks on Speed, a multimedia siege of the art world born out of their frustration with the corporate gallery system.

Performance artists? Techno DJs? Social commentators? Whatever they are, Chicks on Speed defy easy categorisation. They want to do everything, especially if it hasn't been done before. Their mantra seems to be, let's make things happen within as many different media as possible.

Not only have the Chicks released albums on their own label, Chicks On Speed Records, they've developed their own website, their own fashion label, designed numerous album covers and posters for buildings and magazines, exhibited bizarre installations and hosted their own slot on German TV. And they're about to start work on a book.

But is it all just art for art's sake? Murray-Leslie, on the line from San Francisco, fresh from playing the Electroklash tour, thinks not.

The whole point of art, she says, is to cause and gauge reactions.

When the Chicks aren't ripping up the stage with their MiniDisc player and a giant blow-up creation they call the boob monster, they're conducting strange sociological experiments.

Recently they set up a sweatshop in a New York gallery and Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld staff were put to work inside the shop making Chicks On Speed clothing.

At night, the Chicks took on the role as sales assistants at a Chanel boutique and asked customers to justify what they paid for the clothes. Murray-Leslie says it was both a positive and negative expose of the fashion industry.

"They have to take into account the labour, the designers, all these aspects so they can say, 'Now I understand why these clothes aren't cheap or are cheap'. We're exposing slave labour so I see it as a political statement more than anything else."

To further question fashion's value, Chicks on Speed design their own paper dresses by stitching together articles about them, post the designs on their website, wear the dresses and later destroy them.

But as Murray-Leslie explains, Art can only reach a certain amount of people. "That's why we went into music."

Their second album, Chicks On Speed Will Save Us All, The Re-Releases of the Un-Releases is a combination of Teutonic techno, full of truncated conversations and random noise bursts, cut and pasted with the Chicks' blank vocal delivery.

Songs such as Glamour Girl with its deliberately cheesy beats and Mind Your Own Business which propositions, "Can I have a taste of your icecream?" are funny and smart as aggressive and subversive as TISM, but with a riot-girl attitude.

Where Warhol deconstructed the notion of consumerism by reproducing images of Campbells soup cans, Chicks On Speed take inspiration from the pop industry.

One of their biggest inspirations is the Spice Girls, the manufactured five-piece who unintentionally put the limelight as much on the machinations of the band as the music. And like the Spice Girls, the Chicks don't produce their own music or play instruments, relying instead on their avant-techno producer friends such as Tobi Neumann and Patrick Pulsinger.

"The idea is to collaborate, exchange ideas and communicate them. We don't feel we have to justify that we don't make music because that's not our aim. If we wanted to do that we'd learn to play the bass for five years. We always wanted to be a constructed band.

"Look at project Britney or something like that - we are the project but we also make the decisions, we're in control of everything. Instead of having some man behind us saying, 'Girls, you're not allowed to eat too much', we say, 'This is the way we want to do it'."

Chicks On Speed may raise a fist in the air for feminism and artistic integrity, but Murray-Leslie admits they are full of contradictions, the most notable being the fact they licensed a song to Universal Records.

"We did it because a lot of airplay isn't available to independent labels," she reasons. "And sometimes it's not bad to make a compromise like that to reach a wider audience. You can always go back to your own record label, which we have."

To wash their hands of the horrible experience, the Chicks wrote a song called My Universal Pussy is a Superstar.

"We sold out to the devil," she says. "But we admitted it."

Their third album, 99c, is released this year and there is talk of one day erecting a Chicks on Speed building in Berlin, though that's just a dream for now. Whatever the case, their quest remains the same: to save us all. Just what exactly from?

"That's up to you," says Murray-Leslie. "But it's like the song by Jim O'Rourke: Women of the world take over - if they don't, the world will come to an end."

* Chicks on Speed play the Boiler Room, 2.30pm.

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