Chicks On Speed – Artstravaganza

Brighton Dome Concert Hall, Church Street, Brighton,

Tuesday, December 9

Anyone can visit Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean assembly in London.

So the girls behind art pop duo Chicks On Speed decided to pay the Australian a visit.

They took along their new album, Artsravaganza, on which they’ve sampled the controversial publisher as he is interviewed by German playwright Angela Richter.

“We went to meet him and played him the song in the embassy,” reveals Chicks On Speed’s Alex Murray-Leslie, an Australian who is based in Barcelona and divides her time between the band and studying for a PhD at the University Of Technology in Sydney.

“When I first met him I thought he was an artist like us but then I realised after he listened to the music he is a total activist. He is on another wavelength. He liked it because it has been published but it is not his medium of expression.”

Richter was writing a script for her play, Assassinate Assange, and in the interview she asked Assange about the famous line from Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.

In the Chicks On Speed track, God, Assange reveals he previously used the lines to help explain the difficulties people “enmeshed in secretive worlds of great complexity” face.

At the end of the song Murray-Leslie connects the Hamlet line to pioneering British artist Roy Ascott whose work focuses on the impact of digital and mobile communications.

“We wanted it to feel like then and now,” explains Murray-Leslie.

“It is the notion of information controlling us – who is in control of what and what are you in control of. Is there something larger working above and around us, controlling data, controlling info? So it is really about that notion and the God factor being this bigger thing – and what is that today?”

Chicks On Speed’s other half, Cologne-based American-born Melissa Logan, reveals the band have received hate-mail from people “who believe he [Assange] is a rapist”.

Logan believes Assange is the victim of a smear campaign by the media. She points to the fact Assange is holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy and is yet to be charged with any crime.

“I am disappointed in humans and human intellect,” she says. “They are very quick to believe what they are fed.”

Murray-Leslie believes artists are one of the few remaining people to have an activist and creative voice. As such, they have a responsibility to speak out. Logan agrees.

“I can’t imagine just singing about clothes and make-up or boyfriends,” she says. “Someone said about Beyoncé – they really like her but after a while they couldn’t listen to anymore songs about nothing. But I think she’s a great performer.”

Other voices on Artsravaganza are philanthropist, pop star and chairman of TBA21, Princess Francesca von Hapsburg, and Yoko Ono.

It is a concept album, but the pair have twisted the idea to include invention and “new forms of creativity in the digital frontier” because they want make music a multi-sensory experience.

They have been developing apps since 2005 and have now incorporated six new designs into Artstravaganza and its live shows. They want to “empower the audience” with new tools to create collaboration.

The aim is to invite the audience to become “prosumers” – a fusion of producer and consumer.

“It is time to empower audiences with new tools for creative expression, to create the idea of collaboration. It is about co-authorship and a more democratic environment for playing music.”

Apps include the banana vocoder microphone, an audio visual synthesizer, an acoustic spray painting instrument, a face-tracking tool and a turntable with filtering and scratch effects.

The apps were first premiered as part of the Scream exhibition which toured Australia. Audience members will be able to play the apps on two iPads during the Brighton show, which is a UK premiere.

“We set up an installation that people could go into over a six-week period and that is where we generate a lot of our work. We took it out of museums and then onto theatre stages. We toured in Australia to four major arts institutions and now this exhibition is coming to Europe, so the stage show we present in Brighton is elements from that.”

Chicks On Speed are pushing the boundaries of live performance in other ways.

The two create many of the electroclash sounds through “ObjektInstruments” they’ve invented. These include the high-heeled shoe guitar made with designer Max Kibardin, cigar box synthesizers and a hat amplifier made with milliner Christophe Coppins.

Murray-Leslie teaches machines to learn movement as part of her PhD studies. Shoes and musical instruments are her specialist area. She created the idea of shoe guitar – “like going from an actual readymade object and putting in analogue guitar system” – and then developed the E-SHOE, which talked to a computer and could trigger samples, and later an E-SHOE app.

“We have always been at the forefront using new technology and smartphones really open up the tools to the audience. We’ve picked up on this trend that people expect to interact now – whether it’s live performance or the science museum. They want to be part of the creative process.”

Expect a jam session led by the duo where the audience can take over. It does beg the question, though: what if it sounds terrible?

“Mistakes are always good. It’s opening up to that notion of jazz improvisation. You don’t know what is about to happen so you are reacting off each. Usually for us the creative process involves a lot of mistakes. And it’s those mistakes which are interesting – they lead to the unknown.”

- Chicks On Speed’s short film Golden Gang (Dec 8 to 13) will be screened in Brighton Dome Founders Room throughout earsthetic. It is a remake of Luis Buñuel’s iconic film L’Âge d’Or and reveals the band’s surrealist approach. Monday, December 8, to Saturday, December 13. Free.