Chrome - Snapshots of the post-industrial era

In 1979, in an article on the San Francisco alternative scene published by the "New Musical Express" after the release of the anthology "Subterranean Modern" (featuring tracks by Chrome, Residents, Tuxedomoon and Mx-80 Sound), Michael Goldberg wrote: "Chrome are so stubbornly underground that those who've heard about them harbor serious doubts about their actual existence". And rightly so, since throughout their career this legendary band was always reluctant to play live, breaking this rule on only a couple of occasions: on July 20, 1981, at the Palasport in Bologna (after a pressing request from a large group of Italian fans), and on August 21 of that same year at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. Before this article/interview, moreover, the band had never been photographed or interviewed: enough to make their fellow San Franciscans the Residents envious! But let's take things in order.

Damon Edge, a multi-instrumentalist and committed experimenter, formed Chrome in 1976, together with bassist Garry Spain, guitarist John Lambdin and fellow multi-instrumentalist Mike Low. Truth be told, everyone played a bit of everything, including an electric violin and a drum machine.

Among Edge's greatest influences were John Cage, Arabic music (the result of a trip to Morocco) and psychedelia as a whole, especially the West Coast variety. Edge had already had the chance to put this musical background into practice while working for Mgm, for whom he composed soundtracks for pointless, inane B-movies (mostly science fiction, one of Edge's great passions, along with that of his future collaborator, Helios Creed).

In 1977, Siren released The Visitation, a debut album that essentially still showcases raw garage-rock, albeit marred by tribal rhythms and an eccentric psychedelic streak. One of the best comments on the record described it as a meeting between Brian Eno and Carlos Santana. All things considered, the album is a solid calling card, though it's still not quite indicative of what would become the true Chrome sound. Still, there are some notable tracks, including the opener "How Many Years Too Soon" (with a deliberately open structure), "Return To Zanzibar" (which winks at punk) and "Caroline" (extraordinarily evocative).

The first to bail out, after this debut effort, was Mike Low, immediately replaced by the other guitarist (and, when needed, multi-instrumentalist) Helios Creed. It was his arrival that would define, once and for all, the classic Chrome sound, whose first great manifesto is Alien Soundtracks, released in 1978, accompanied by a cover that's as stunning as it is unsettling in just the right way. Someone once described the sound of this record as "the Stooges playing Can in cyberspace". And they weren't wrong. The opener, "Chromosome Damage", does indeed recall the Iguana's band, with its graceless, filthy, unhealthy punk; but in reality, Chrome use this sonic archetype only to show its thousand facets, its thousand musical resonances. And indeed, after a while, the track ends up morphing into a whirlwind of tape-loops and guitar fragments, before returning to punk's footsteps, but this time with a powerful sci-fi charge. "The Monitors" repeats the trick, but this time calling to mind Pere Ubu, while "All Data Lost", using drones and echoes, builds a scenario that revives the intergalactic excursions of Hawkwind, weaving a luminous psychedelic trance. "SS Cygni" fuses a skeletal groove with lo-fi guitar digressions. "Nova Feedback" opens amid dazzling noise that drifts sinuously through the cosmos; then a drum machine begins to stretch out the space with an eternal, circular rhythm, while Creed traces lysergic trajectories that bring to mind a Jerry Garcia intent on mapping the boundaries of his own mind. Here and there, like menacingly elusive shadows, abyssal crevices appear, symbols of an eternity endlessly turning upon itself. "Pygmies In Zee Dark" takes yet another leap into the dark, assembling minimalist percussion, stretched-out noise, treated vocals, distorted and out-of-focus macabre dances, hisses and detuned guitars. "Slip It To The Android" also makes use of the electric violin, which stages impressionist digressions in the background, while Creed unrolls a Dadaist carpet of blistering solos. In "Pharoah Chromium", we come across another of their oddball dances, infected by Creed's usual exuberant guitar. "ST 37" is a delightful divertissement, a mad account of their "strange" trips (in the interview mentioned above, Edge had no trouble admitting to being a regular user of lysergic drugs). "Magnetic Dwarf Reptile" shows, finally, Edge's great passion for the bold experiments of kraut-rock and for the freak surrealism of Zappa.

All of Alien Soundtrack has a "provisional", "fragmentary" character. That's because the "experimental" factor is so often overwhelming that it tears apart any "structural" constraint. And then, the clearly psychedelic lineage could only stretch the input of each track to unimaginable lengths. Another point worth making concerns Creed's contribution: his guitar work doesn't appear fully integrated into the (pseudo)-structure of the record, because most of the tracks had already been recorded by the time Creed joined the rest of the band, leaving him with what we might call a "secondary" role.

After Alien Soundtracks, John Lambdin will bail out. At this point, given Garry Spain's increasingly marginal role, Edge and Creed become the sole owners of the project. On the following album, Half Machine Lip Moves (1979), Spain is credited on only two tracks, while John L. Cyborg becomes the name given to the drum machine.

Unlike the previous record, Half Machine Lip Moves is a far more compact and cohesive work. The fragmentation shifts from "structural" to "organic", making the tracks sound like monstrous collages of countless microscopic sound sources. These are incredibly powerful snapshots of the (post)-industrial era, filtered through a sinister, apocalyptic light, at times even brutally iconoclastic. The music pours out magmatic and abrasive, demolishing the imaginary boundary that too often is assumed to separate genres.

It opens with "Tv As Eyes", still noisy, schizoid punk, with electronic torture in the finale. Immediately after comes "Zombie Warfare", a prodigious suite in three movements: it starts with a stratospheric guitar riff, countered by a pounding rhythm section and electronic trails; it continues through treated vocals, lopsided vortexes, synthetic bubbles, cacophonies and various disturbances. Edge and Creed show, right from these very first bars, their fearsomely irreverent intent. You can almost picture them, having the time of their lives as they slowly dismantle the good old song form. "March Of The Chrome Police (A Cold Clammy Bombing)" continues their highly personal rereading of garage-rock: the peremptory stride is "disturbed" by strange voices that creep into the rhythmic fabric, creating an effect of psychic unease.

In the finale, this umpteenth tribute to the Detroit sound is swallowed by a storm of feedback, which nevertheless fails to completely upend the track's core structure. "You've Been Duplicated" continues the massacre with the usual "processed" voices and a continuous, peremptory metallic screech. "Mondo Anthem" is a sonic bulldozer, scarred by furious brushstrokes before unwinding into a minimal free-jazz of assorted noises, and then launched into a dissolute progression, where found percussion, chemical fragments, an organ played by aliens in acid withdrawal, devastating cacophonous eruptions and a tremendous, violent sense of total destruction all peek through. Loose-reined percussion again introduces the title track; then, using as usual a blatantly destructuring technique that relies on discontinuity within the track itself, Edge & Creed give life to their most powerful requiem for the age of machines, environmental catastrophe and human alienation. It feels like witnessing a solemn rite, in which, however, the divine component has been annihilated and absorbed as just another fragment in this sludge of sonic debris. Still, Chrome, like good masters of ceremony, prove to have total control over the chaos. The sci-fi cyberpunk of "Abstract Nympho" disintegrates in a sudden collision, and the sound takes on gargantuan contours, before being struck by a mass of crazed asteroids. "Turned Around" forms a degraded kind of futurist ballad, where the pathos comes from the interlocking play between a rubbery bass, a guitar unleashing stiletto stabs of distortion in ascending delirium, and an amphetamine-fueled voice that chases those distortions and makes them its own. Also present and accounted for are the metonymies of "Zero Time", the tape loops and circular solo complete with primitivist chanting of "Creature Eternal" (with the odd trace, here and there, of Residents) and the mighty pulse of "Critical Mass", which brings down the curtain on an absolutely unique and unrepeatable record, well suited to the definition Creed himself gave it: "Industrial Strength Music".

Leveraging the corrosive power of a truly original sound, Chrome carry out a futuristic "montage of attractions", where sonic fragments climb over one another, on a treadmill of emotional shards and cerebral barbarism. A stone's throw from Silicon Valley, the global epicenter of the degradation of the human race caused by the increasingly massive use of computers and robots, the band seems right at home in its nuclear bunker. Er, in its recording studios. Their firm determination to remain "underground" at all costs can also be read as an act of intellectual, and why not, spiritual integrity. Only by operating in a kind of self-imposed anonymity could Edge & co. manage to cast an undistorted gaze on the prevailing Apocalypse, psychological and otherwise, of the post-industrial era. But if the gaze is lucid and cold, as befits men now beyond good and evil, what we perceive, at first, is a terrifying and unrecognizable mass of sound sources, which only later, through a slower and more laborious decoding, reveals itself as the scenario in which, unfortunately, we have been chained by our own achievements.

Years later, Half Machine Lip Moves remains one of those forgotten masterpieces that time will never manage to erode, because, unluckily for time, it lies in an empty, imperishable space.

In 1980, the EP Read Only Memory was released, featuring an even heavier use of electronics. The influence of Throbbing Gristle is undeniable, even though only a couple of the tracks here ("I Am The Jaw") manage to hold up against what the seminal English masters were doing. Shortly after, they recorded their fourth official album, Red Exposure, which ties in with what Gary Numan and Cabaret Voltaire were doing on the other side of the Atlantic. That said, it has to be noted that the devastating creativity of the previous two records (and especially of Half Machine Lip Moves) begins its slow decline here, even though there are still some fairly effective moments, such as "Room 101" and "Nights Of The Earth".

In 1981, after another EP, Inworlds, the Edge/Creed duo, backed by the Stench brothers on rhythm section, recorded Blood On The Moon, where nine episodes of acid, vibrant space-punk follow one another. Creed is in great form, as shown by the masterful guitar work on tracks such as "The Strangers" and "Perfumed Metal". Although it's a record where experimentation is pared down to a minimum, audience response is once again nil. The normalization process continues with 3rd Stone From The Sun, an even more dynamic album, more oriented toward the song form. Only the imposing "Armageddon" and the noise-paved pop of the title track are worthy of standing alongside the masterpieces of the past.

After this ultimately unconvincing effort, Creed decides to pursue a solo career. Edge, for his part, flies to France, where, recruiting new collaborators, he releases "Into The Eyes Of The Zombie King". But without Creed's guitar, Chrome has become nothing more than a poor copy of Killing Joke, now focused, without much conviction, on a dark-tinged synth-pop that is about as shabby as it gets.

After a live album featuring numerous previously unreleased tracks — The Lyon Concert (1985) — in 1986 came Another World, this time aping the Cure of "Seventeen Seconds". It's a mediocre album, truly unworthy of a band that, at the end of the '70s, had been capable of writing indelible pages in rock history. The travesty would continue until 1994, when The Clairaudient Syndrome was released, an even blander and more pointless work.

Forgotten by everyone, Damon Edge died at his home in San Francisco in 1995 — his body would only be found a month after his death! At this point, Creed, who in the meantime had enjoyed some satisfaction as a solo artist, decided to re-found Chrome, bringing in Tommy Cyborg (who would handle the electronic arrangements) and the usual Stench brothers on rhythm section.

The first milestone of this new venture is the mini-album Third Seed From The Bud (1996), which greatly boosted the band's standing. Confirming this rebirth, the following year came the album Retro Transmission, with excellent tracks such as "Phobeus", "Artificial Human" and "More Space". Tidal Force, from 1998, is, to this day, the last Chrome album to have seen the light of day. Meanwhile, Creed has carried on, without pause, his uneven solo career, even though none of his albums can be compared, in terms of creativity and emotional impact, to Chrome's landmark works, especially that monument to chaos and post-atomic unease that goes by the name of Half Machine Lip Moves.

At the start of 2013, Helios Creed, by then with almost 40 albums behind him, rediscovered unreleased material from the golden era, recorded during the sessions for Half Machine Lip Moves and Red Exposure. Discarded material, or rather surplus material, which impressed Creed enough to push him to pick the work back up where it had been left off. By cleaning up, remastering and completing the tracks, they ended up with the 18 tracks of Half Machine From The Sun, The Lost Chrome Tracks From 79-80, which saw the light of day thanks to advance funding from fans via the Pledge Music website. We find everything that characterized Chrome here, the dissonances and the melodies, especially on the potential single "Something Rhythmic (I Can't Wait)", the minimalist space rock (like the opening "Anything") and the meandering acid-rock kind ("Looking For Your Door", perfectly judged in length), the synthesizers and the alternating vocals of Creed and Edge (even distorted ones, as on the harsh "Fukushima (Nagasaki)", a bastard offshoot of hard rock tinged with acid rain), experimental touches like the magmatic background mutter on the menacing "The Inevitable", or the obsessive piano cycles of "Charlies Little Problem". There's no shortage of instrumental tracks either, sometimes just noisy interludes, as in the case of the very short "Intervention" or "Housewarming Party", sometimes long and dreamy like "Autobahn Brazil", which drifts among colors and nebulae without the screeching found elsewhere, filling out a full 77 minutes of record.

The psychedelic journeys don't stop here, as the instrumental "Moog Piece", with the moog, indeed, wailing over a gallop that suggests movement through shifting chromatics, creating a particularly dynamic effect, as well as the closing "Sunset", decidedly more acid, offer new, unbraked, spinning visions. Counterbalancing them are the four opening space-rock tracks, to which one could easily add "Sound And Light", with guitar reminiscent of early gothic rock, the slow, pained melancholy of "The Rain", with its repeated lines almost like a prayer, and the proto-industrial "Morrison", a mechanical collage of voices and alien sounds chasing each other out of sync, eventually sliding into "cut-up".

The fear of possible disappointment was always lurking, as often happens with releases made from leftover material from another era. But here we're facing something decidedly alive, and any wariness dissolves entirely under the vibrant jolts that carry us, in a paradox worthy of a time machine, both into their past and into an impossible, unsettling, surreal future conjured by Chrome's fertile imagination.

After twelve years of inactivity, old Creed gets back on track under the band's glorious name, releasing in 2014 Feel It Like A Scientist, containing sixteen brand-new tracks.

With one foot firmly planted in the past and the other just as firmly in the present, the Californian guitarist, flanked by no fewer than six new travel companions, unleashes over an hour of deformed martial stomps ("Lipstick"), Stooges-like getaways ("Nephilims (Help Me!)"), interstellar chases in hardelic mode ("Lady Feline"), reversed tapes, voices seeping out of the goddamn walls and spastic collage-work ("Prophecy", "Slave Planet Institution"), attempts at android power-ballads ("Something In The Cloud"), swaggering boogie ("Six"), warped visions feeding on fourth-hand science-fiction imagery ("Captain Boson", "Cyberchondria"), sweaty cyberpunk ("Big Brats"), slow-motion experiments ("The Mind") and faded postcards from far-flung worlds ("Systems Within Systems", "Nymph Droid").

The foundations of this album all lie in the first three works released between 1976 and 1979. Echoes of them can be heard pretty much everywhere in these tracks, which, however painstakingly crafted and however much genuine enthusiasm went into them, might at best nudge new converts to trace the river back to the source of their sound.

Contributions by Federico Gennari ("Half Machine From The Sun, The Lost Chrome Tracks From 79-80")

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