Chicks On Speed - Industrious Antagonists

Feature, By Miss X, 19th March, 2008

For their latest Australian tour, Chicks on Speed played at Future Music Festivals across the country and conducted a workshop for L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival, called Collaboration in Design: Fashion as Song.

Renowned for their music performance, Chicks on Speed prefer the term “artistic multi-tasking” to refer to a project history that includes music, art, performance, video, a record label and apparel design. This manic versatility has evolved into the unique style that characterises their work: cut-out sounds with fraying edges layered on top of one another, theatrical performance with colourful costumes, video footage assembled from images of past work and eye-catching incidents (such as model Heidi Klum tumbling over on the catwalk). In a Chicks On Speed show everything happens at once.

At Melbourne’s ACMI for their Fashion Week workshop, Chicks On Speed members Alex Murray-Leslie, Melissa Logan and Kathi Glass laid the stage with a pretty mess of tulle, paint boxes, and a saxophone. For the next hour they used a combination of video, graphics, live music and speech to tell the story of past work, to evoke their methods and inspire versatility.

“We often get asked in when people have run out of ideas,” Alex tells me. “We try to show people that you can be DIY and produce things yourself.”

So, was that the message for L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Week?

“It’s obviously a branded event, and it’s a pity that there isn’t more crossover between the cultural and the commercial programs. I think we had an audience of progressive designers and design students, but we would have liked to see more fashion industry people.”

You do get the feeling that Chicks On Speed want audiences they can provoke, challenging crowds at the end of their performance to answer the question, ‘What is luxury?’ or, ‘Is art luxury?’

“It’s good that there is money from the Victorian Government for a cultural and education program,” Alex concedes. “And they have opened the festival up to the public. It’s not always like that.”

Chicks On Speed find the exchange between fashion and music so compelling that they even have a track called Sewing Machine. But there may be other links. With rap stars like Kanye West wanting to start their own fashion line, is there are trend toward musicians producing clothing to compensate for declining album sales, due to free downloading over the internet?

“We have always made lots of things,” says Alex, before Melissa adds, “But maybe in some way, we have been working on this record now for the past three years and we wonder does anyone even listen to records anymore, who buys them, what is the point?”

Perhaps MySpace and iTunes have changed the music industry?

“MySpace has in some ways,” says Alex. “It used to be that bands would be booked for a festival about even months in advance, now it’s more like two months in advance. It really sped up all the production cycles. Now bands can get big and be booked for shows without even having released a album or a single – just through what they’ve put up on MySpace.”

Has it changed the audience to your music?

“We find that when we are being written about and promoted in New Music Express, we will have all these ‘jaded trendies’ coming to our gigs, and when we were getting press in this trashy German Bravo Magazine we had a lot of young people coming along to see us,” Melissa answers. “Your publicity always affects your audience,” adds Alex.

How did you establish a structure that would let you work on multiple projects?

“We had a lot of arguments,” says Melissa. “We were thinking will have these different departments and different systems, and that is when we lost Kiki [Moorse].”

One of the founding members of Chicks on Speed, Kiki Moorse, left several years ago to pursue a solo career as a DJ and music producer. Chicks On Speed’s independent record label features artists such as Le Tigre, Kevin Blechdom, DAT Politics and Angie Reed, allowing more flexibility for touring and work on art and design projects. They include working with Designers Against AIDS and European retail giant H&M, making t-shirts for Fashion Against Aids – a campaign to appeal to the people aged under 24 who are most at risk of infection with AIDS.

In the future, Chicks On Speed want to continue performing and working with music and audio-visual media. They are working with Melbourne shop Third Drawer Down on homewares. And Alex wants to design a couch.

“I went shopping recently and the only one I liked was about $10,000, so I might as well just make one myself,” she says. You never know – a couch, designed Chicks on Speed style, may just end up as a musical instrument in one of their shows.

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