Chicks on Speed

Cutting The Edge, the result of two years of productive creativity: filming video, making art installations, organizing Girl Monster extravaganzas, reading books, exhibiting all over the planet, making patchwork fashion collections, building high-heeled shoe guitars, high-tech super suits that trigger sound and video and other Objekt Instruments, and so much more. Cutting The Edge utilizes 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 A Physician. The studios where the album was made included hotel rooms, trains, bathrooms in the 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 '60s bubblegum-pop, like "Buzz," which is all about the lost glamour of flying, and the Fassbinder-inspired "Black And White Diva" featuring Kiki Moorse, who departed the group 2 years ago to pursue a solo career, to "Sewing Machine," which 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; amplified rocks, a high-heeled shoe guitar, a sax going through a guitar amp, plucking a gutted piano, and the inspiration for the album title, scissors.