Chrome

If so-called "land art" implies the territorial projection of an idea, then, with a bit of sadistic imagination, one could consider Silicon Valley (that is, the Santa Clara Valley near San Francisco, California) as one of the greatest works of the genre. And all thanks to that process of slow self-destruction triggered by the silicon revolution around the mid-1970s.

Rarely has a region's landscape been so revealing of an existential condition. And rarely have artists seemed so isolated, caught between towering skyscrapers and electronic circuitry, as to lose their minds over it. So the only viable space left was that of the underground, to be understood in Dostoevskyan, metaphorical terms — as the place par excellence of the unconscious, of the most "intimate" and, perhaps, incommunicable private self. Perhaps. Because the artists (in our case, the musicians; "certain" musicians...) chose to come out into the open anyway, but only through their creations (think of the extreme case of the Residents), refusing to feed the image-obsessed society their own image — which, incidentally, is perhaps anything but interesting or "necessary".

The attack is frontal; and how could it be otherwise, given that standing right in front of them — believe it or not — was the "death factory", imposing and sinister, though not so much as to stop the Throbbing Gristle (undisputed fathers of "industrial music") from desecrating it, carrying off the alien and alienating music (...music from the death factory...) of their first, historic album ("Second Annual Report", 1977)? Sure, Genesis P-Orridge's band was English, but Monte Cazazza — a friend of the band and a great, deranged agitator of apocalyptic late-1970s San Francisco — was still a bridge between the two "artistic regions", English and American, both steeped, deep down, in the same zeitgeist. Now, if you picture that San Francisco, don't think of the "flower power" and hippies of years past (after all, even in the '60s things weren't all roses...). Think instead of a Cronenberg film. Think of colors on the verge of liquefying, with a general tendency toward green. A technological society that outlaws thought, reason, the heart. And these, never tamed, return in the form of monsters, from the bowels, from the depths of the very people who had banished them, ehm... underground. They have gaunt, weary, disgusted faces. They don't like the light. They seem like vampires, but they aren't. They'd rather stay in the dark, sure, but they're not vampires.

Take the photo of Chrome that features prominently in the monograph dedicated to them on this very site: Damon Edge (multi-instrumentalist) and Helios Creed (the "guitar hero" of the outfit) certainly don't look like they're having the time of their lives. You can bet that mentally they're telling the photographer to go to hell. Incidentally, up to that point they had never given an interview. Concerts? Forget it! They had other things on their minds.

Edge died in complete solitude some years ago. It took people a while to notice. Perhaps the house in which he lay dead, sprawled on the floor, closely resembled the one that graced the cover of their first masterpiece, "Alien Soundtrack" (1977). But those eyes peering out from the walls are anything but welcoming: almost a definitively "negative" version of the pop-art-style house painted (actually, it was a collage) by Richard Hamilton in 1950s London and first exhibited at a show with the "prophetic" title "This Is Tomorrow". Modest, these artists, don't you think? In all honesty, tomorrow would turn out to be even more unsettling and macabre. It would be "postmodern", and so-called intellectuals would be carrying Lyotard's essay "The Postmodern Condition" under their arm, tormenting themselves perhaps because utopia had gone to hell, work had been devalued, and alienation was shoving its way in with formidable, thoroughly ill-mannered force. In short, welcome to the era of "the decline of Western civilization", to dust off the title of Penelope Spheeris's legendary documentary film about punk California on the eve of the 1980s.

But Germs, Fear, Circle Jerks and Black Flag made use of a "medium", hardcore (a hyperkinetic version of punk), that drew no distinction between signifier and signified: the rage and the invective aimed at that society were one and the same with the very means chosen to express them. Speed, incendiary lyrics, volume cranked to the max. The voice of a generation. The voice of unease. Certainly no sideshow freak act. It was the attitude that made something "punk", not the genre as such. "Punk" as something dirty, filthy, rebellious, outside the rules. In a word: revolutionary. That's why the Residents, Tuxedomoon, Pere Ubu, and Devo too (for all their stylistic differences) were "punk". And Chrome, even more so. Especially the Chrome of "Half Machine Lip Moves", which remains one of the most terrifying, visceral and solemn assaults on the age of machines, as well as a cornerstone of rock as a whole. A gem built of garage refractions and psychedelic inlay work, yet soaked in a terrifying impact force, bordering on cubist deconstruction and Dadaist formal dissolution.

Chrome pile up mountains of sonic waste (they don't bother sorting their recycling, mind you...), assembled into monstrous, abnormal collages, while beneath it all they let churning, magmatic rivers of noise, dissonance, feedback and the rest flow freely. One of the defining traits of this "Industrial Strength Music" (as Edge and Creed themselves called it) is its "aleatory" elements (such as structural discontinuities and certain pieces that are literally improvised within the tracks). Edge, in tune with the ideas of Allen Kaprow (the theorist of the "happening" and a friend from his student days), held that, more than the finished version of a piece, what mattered most was developing "chance events" — precisely because such events created a kind of ambiguity between what had been planned and what, instead, lay latent within that planning (also in keeping with the more fringe strands of psychedelic culture: Red Crayola, Pink Floyd, and the Deviants above all; and, especially, with the "aleatoric music" of John Cage, one of Edge's great passions). That's why, during recording sessions, the pair often ended up inserting into the basic structure countless, let's call them, "collateral events" (see the Dadaist use of electronics, the torture inflicted on the vocal line, and the appropriation of "concrete" sound sources). Connected to all this is the matter of the "depths of the subconscious": that is, the "aleatory" element becomes, for Chrome, a sort of symbol of that hidden world, that underground which is the place where the relationship between man and technological society becomes productive — but in terms of unease and alienation.

Ultimately, we're talking about music that has remained truly "unique" over time, unrepeatable, perhaps because it was too tightly bound to that precise historical moment. In short, to put it plainly: one third Hawkwind (minus their "hippie-freak" rhetoric), one third Stooges + MC5 + Blue Cheer, and finally, one third krautrock thoroughly rinsed in acid. Better still if you add a few traces of the Residents (the ones from "N-Er-Gee Crisis Blues") and of eclectic Frank Zappa. In other words, lesson one: how to hand a "sound" down to history...

A first example? The grinding razor-slash that preludes the ultra-psychedelic massacre of garage-rock on "Tv As Eye", with a space-rock finale amid "concrete" hisses, concentric drones and astral dissonances. As if to say: who the hell do these two think they are? (Remember that bassist Gary Spain had by then a purely secondary role.) You barely have time to catch your breath before "these two" hit you with a three-part mini-suite ["Zombie Warfare (Can't Let You Down)"] that slaps your ears without mercy: 1) a swaggering riff and thudding drums, amid reverbs and stellar synth deliriums; 2) steel percussion pummeling screams on the anvil of a minimal guitar figure; 3) galactic tribalism, electronic geysers, lysergic gashes, and the dying vocal of Edge or, far more likely, of the mummy enthroned on the cover... Lesson two: how to crash Eisenstein's "montage of attractions" head-on into industrial music. We mentioned the influence of a certain Detroit sound (MC5, Stooges), and so here's "March Of The Chrome Police (A Cold Clammy Bombing)", a garage/hard rock crime gangrened by "psychic" inserts of found voices (yes, but from where?) and by the haughty, contemptuous vocal of a great Damon Edge. The monstrously distorted recital of "You've Been Duplicated" launches xylophone-like percussion into orbit, along with atomic guitar detonations (remember Helios Creed next time you compile some list of the greatest rock guitarists...) and a terrifying chaos of vocal fragments. The massacre, endlessly repeated and untamed, is their only religion. The mission is to bury Western civilization (musical and otherwise) under tons of rubble. Sonic rubble, sure; but perhaps all the heavier and more claustrophobic for it.

If in the 1960s the cosmos had risen to become a metaphor for a rebirth as longed-for as it was, deep down, impossible, by the precise moment Chrome put out this masterpiece, utopia had been overtaken by a kind of terminal hyperrealism. Okay, this is, in essence, still space-rock, albeit heavily degraded and therefore anything but pure (see the "punk" attitude mentioned above). Space still carries symbolic value, but something, mind you, has changed. The Chrome spacecraft is, more than anything, a huge, putrid carcass. Everything it's hauling is garbage: all the utopias. This music is like a landfill set adrift in the cosmos. Even the cosmos itself, the ultimate virgin territory, has been infested. Man has stamped his mark of infamy on the whole of creation. Nothing has been spared. And nothing will ever be the same. And so, like a damned prophet, the San Francisco outfit, in unison with all the great bands of the era, foresaw the coming collapse of humanity. And they did so by forging a highly iconoclastic musical medium, well ahead of its time. "Avant-garde", the real thing. A swift kick in the ass to saccharine pop and its ilk.

Like the well-placed one delivered by "Mondo Anthem". A first half that stirs together, in one go, a passage worthy of a monstrous kammerspiel, a skeletal Creed riff, and schizophrenic, highly expressionist synth brushstrokes, straight from the palette of his malignant lordship Lucifer (what if he too had a taste for gestural painting?). The second half, meanwhile, launches into a whirlwind of metallic rhythms, pierced by goliardic cacophonies (bye-bye, Mr. Zappa!) and worn down by sudden sorties of infected electronics. It all ends up dissolving into a sleepwalking micro-recitation, itself swept away almost as soon as it begins by a cannibal hurricane that, in all likelihood, resumes its solitary wandering on the following title track. This too is split into two halves: the intergalactic garage rock of the first (with violent percussive broadsides) is offset by an immense depiction of the end, amid floating drones, off-key guitar flubs, hermetic wisecracks, and a grandiloquent heartbeat (imagine a primitivist yet symphonic synthesis of Faust, Neu!, the Residents and Hawkwind).

Next, introduced by a sort of mini-soundtrack to a lost kingdom, comes the sci-fi-tinged cyberpunk of "Abstract Nympho", hurled at breakneck speed atop a wall of sound of gargantuan proportions, before vanishing, wrapped in a layer of lysergic rattling, amid the intangible colors of the galaxies. If by chance you still have doubts about the sheer greatness of this album, follow lesson three: how to assemble a futurist ballad out of blazing ascending guitar scales, amphetamine-fueled declamation, a circular drum-machine loop (affectionately named John L. Cyborg; as if to say: even machines have a soul...) and a despondent, plodding bassline ("Turned Around"). "Zero Time", for its part, is a pure metronomic cocktail of drum machine, synth, stripped-bare guitar and incandescent whirlwinds. More tape loops and vacant vocals follow on "Creature Eternal", while the finale draws on the rhythmic power of "Critical Mass", almost a summary of their destructive, crushing art.

To be honest, if technological civilization has caused the damage it has caused (and is still causing), laying fertile ground for music like this, one could almost be glad that the machines will one day end up dominating us completely. At most, after all, we'll just call them by name...

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27/10/2006