Cutting the Edge

VINYL FORMAT. Double LP housed in a gatefold sleeve. Chicks On Speed's fifth album, 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 and 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 two 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. Most of the songs on the album have been created by using the Objekt Instruments; 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.