There’s more talk of Chicago music in the 80s on Tuesday, March 6 at 6 PM, when Chris will appear with DJ Frankie Knuckles and Santiago Durango at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the Chicago Sounds in the 80s program, hosted by Jim Derogatos and Greg Kot.

Later on Tuesday night, at 10 PM on WXRT, Chris will be speaking with Jon Langford and playing selections from Artificial Madness and various Ministry/Cocks tracks, as well as some old Scottish post punk classics. (Listen)

Show up or tune in to find out what Chris has to say!

Chris and his band put on a fabulous show at The Hideout last week. More footage will be coming, but check out this video of Classically Wounded or this photo gallery. If you have any footage of the show, post a link here or on Facebook!

In anticipation of the show, Time Out Chicago ran a concert preview and interview by Areif Sless-Kitain. The Chicago Tribune also ran a story, Chris Connelly keeps on searching for more blank canvases to explore.

Update: Time Out Chicago also named “Artificial Madness” as one of their top albums of 2011!

More blogs are reviewing “Artificial Madness” as well. Check out this review at Dawn of the Deaf and an interview at Chaos Control Digizine.

If you’re enjoying “Artificial Madness”, be sure to rate it on Amazon or iTunes!

• Artificial Madness Brings Connelly Back at Liquid [Hip]
• Artificial Madness: Chris Connelly, Part I at Twisted Peppermint
• Chris Connelly’s Artifical Madness by David Musto, Chicago Indie Rock Examiner
• Metal Monday Volume 44 Pop Blerd

If you haven’t picked up Artificial Madness yet and want a chance to win a copy, join Chris on the social web — like him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter! Once Chris gets to 3,000 Facebook likes and 1,000 Twitter followers, we’ll be randomly awarding fans and followers copies of the new album or Chris’s first work of fiction, Ed Royal. Tell your friends and let’s get those numbers up!

Over at Decibel, Chris has composed a new set of confessions: Confessions of a Hysterical Music Addict 1975, detailing the record shops he frequented growing up in Edinburgh.

Continuing his reflections back, Chris contributed to An oral history of Chicago’s metal scene, part 3: the ’90s for the A.V. Club. (The A.V. Club also listed The Episodes at number 20 on their list of unconventional recording spaces.)

And don’t miss this track-by-track overview of Artificial Madness over at Alarm Press!

Update: If you missed the show, you can read the show notes and download an MP3 on the Sound Opinions web site!

Originally posted on July 4.

“But what were the eighties, if not disjointed, and further, as Connelly shows us, the eighties with drugs and young love and hotheaded mothers sprinkled into the mix. Ed Royal ultimately captures this scene, this time of life in particular for the young main character, in all his youthful, desperate hunger in a youthful, desperate age.”

Read the full review.

Here’s the full review:

Between 1997 and 2004, Chris Connelly made a handful of small recordings — Ultimate Seaside Companion, Blonde Exodus, Largo (with Bill Rieflin), Private Education — that stood outside virtually every scene and genre. These were elegant, poetic chamber pieces that captured various states of the human heart, whether in passion, delusion or somewhere in between. This was music that struggled to come together, and was held together musically while it lyrically fell apart, albeit as gracefully as a tragic character in a ’60s French film would find his world collapsing around him. Like Scott Walker and Jackie Leven, Connelly didn’t even consider what was going on around him. All of his music seemed to tunnel inside and bring out whatever was there, the pearls of wisdom or simply the blood, sand, dark matter to be found in the marrow. This series of albums culminated with 2004′s brilliant collection of off-the wire pop songs Night of Your Life. On The Episodes, Connelly moves into a new phase. Working with Ben Vida and Tim Kinsella, Connelly keeps a largely acoustic vibe, but he’s tossed the tight structures, languid, decadent textures, and airless spaces aside in favor of wide-open spaces that accent a kind of tribalism and willingness to let the elements themselves have a say in his proceedings. One track, in fact, “Soul Boys/Hard Legends” was field recorded in a dark, cold Wisconsin forest at night. And there’s a vibe here that feels free, cast off, if a bit sadder and more paranoid.

Connelly’s poetic lyrics cannot be denied, but this set’s reliance on deep sounding percussion, repetitive melodic — or more monochromatic — fixtures such as a guitar strumming a single chord for long periods of time, atmospheric intrusions, and loose adherence to musical time gives the entire proceeding a kind of unhinged feel. While the opening cut possesses more beauty than anything he’s ever released, with its brushed acoustic guitars, hand percussions and near samba tempo, Connelly sings: “It’s unlikely that you will remember/The text that reflected on you/I’m coming to grips with your mirror lips/I can read all about me on you…Looking glass vacuum conditions/The questions I’m dying to ask/The lips can’t accuse/They’ll cut open themselves/The face can’t agree it’s a mask/You’re standing behind every doorway/Absorbing the neighbor’s distress/The writing’s reversed, the story’s perverse/The finale’s a stain on your dress…” All the while congas, vibes and crash cymbals pick up steam as the guitars are all but drowned out and Connelly’s voice barely rises above the din, though he’s struggling to, he’s right up against it; his anguished words bring out tensions in the music that it tries to transcend. All the percussion serves to move the narrative to its rather disturbing conclusion. This is a love song, but one from the other side of loss and memory. Connelly’s trying to climb out of his own lyric tropes but they hypnotize him through the music. They are both stuck in a dance that has no real end. It never really began, either, it articulated itself in the middle of the scandalous truth: it is obsession painted as longing. At over eight minutes, it sets the tone for a remarkable, but truly uncomfortable recording. Five of the seven tunes here are over eight minutes, with the longest (“Henry vs. Miller”) clocks in at over eleven.

Monotonous (as in hypnotic) guitar chords usher in “Son of Empty Sam,” a dark and tense tale about a man so drenched by fear he has to make the claim “I cut down all my friends/To see where I might lie/On simple blades of unlit truth/The truth will bleed you dry.” Electric guitars and a big, deep shuffling tom tom pulse the steady, strident bassline as Connelly sings, keeping his voice just on the sane side of total panic. In many ways, this track, nearly ten minutes in length, is reprised near the end of the set in another mammoth drum and vibes workout with loose-stringed guitars in “The Son of the Empty Sequel.” Rather than a droning, chaotic acoustic exercise in tension, this is the “party version.” It plays as nearly as long, but the movement of the electric band offers a different shade on the lyrics in the sense that one is given the impression that the protagonist has crossed over. The party is in the acceptance of the other side of the sanity divide. The drums slip time, the vibes play through the beat, and the guitars play a swampy shuffle that resembles some kind of drunken rockabilly as Nate Kinsella’s piano prattles in an out of tune vamp. “Every Ghost Has an Orchestra” is introduced with multiple layers of strummed 12-string guitars. There is some high pitched sound just under them that feels brittle and uneasy, but then Connelly’s words are anything but welcoming; he’s speaking from the place of the damned and finds a perverse humor in the acceptance of his place. But he offers his tragic wisdom to another, someone known, who cannot accept his/hers. The words read like Poe, speaking as a ghost to a future one: there is no escape. On The Episodes, Chris Connelly, with help from Vida and the Kinsellas, has reinvented himself once more without betraying his gift for the poetry of loss and oblivion that has been at the heart of his best material. The sound is rawer, it’s earthier, it’s literally gone. This is a man with a hellhound on his trail, which he looks back at almost tenderly. There is a monotony in this music that will drive some mad, but then, that’s the point. It’s tribal, but it’s a tribe of one, wailing in the desolation and warbling his hard discovered truths into the void of silence, and it’s deafening. Like Georges Bataille and Jean Genet, this is a music that comes from the outside and projects even further, even as it comes echoing back to him at twice the volume. This is the spiritual side of the darkness, and it is as romantic and true as anything he has written and recorded before, but it comes from the cave of a Wildman. Lucky for us, that Wildman possesses a language in sound and tongue that speech cannot hold hostage or deny. Welcome to the valley of the hunted. Highly recommended.

]]> http://chrisconnelly.com/news/media/2007/05/review-of-the-episodes-at-allmusic/feed/ 2 http://chrisconnelly.com/news/media/2007/04/chris-on-chicagoland-tv/ http://chrisconnelly.com/news/media/2007/04/chris-on-chicagoland-tv/#comments Sun, 01 Apr 2007 16:06:38 +0000 The Webmistress http://www.chrisconnelly.com/news/media/2007/04/chris-on-chicagoland-tv/ This Metromix video features bits of the February 17th show at the Hideout plus interview snippets with Chris. Check it out!

In case that URL doesn’t work, try this link instead.

]]> http://chrisconnelly.com/news/media/2007/04/chris-on-chicagoland-tv/feed/ 0 http://chrisconnelly.com/news/media/2006/09/article-in-the-chicago-reader/ http://chrisconnelly.com/news/media/2006/09/article-in-the-chicago-reader/#comments Sun, 03 Sep 2006 01:54:15 +0000 The Webmistress http://207.158.22.198/media/2006/09/article-in-the-chicago-reader/ The Blair Witch-y Project
Industrial-disco refugee Chris Connelly heads for the woods with Tim Kinsella.
By Bob Mehr

A couple of weeks ago German director Wim Wenders was at Reckless Records’ Wicker Park store, shooting footage for a documentary on music scenes around the world, and between takes he decided to do a little record shopping. One of his purchases was a new box set of CDs by Chris Connelly, who happens to be the store’s manager. “He actually bought the box first, and then recognized my face from it,” says Connelly.

Connelly’s face is familiar to many in town, and not just from behind the counter at Reckless. An Edinburgh, Scotland, native, he started his career in the mid-80s, singing in the dance-rock group Fini Tribe, but soon got involved in Chicago’s industrial-music scene. In 1987, after meeting members of Ministry in the London offices of Wax Trax, he was invited to join Ministry offshoot the Revolting Cocks, which brought him to the U.S. Since then he’s also worked with Ministry and groups on the Invisible Records roster like Damage Manual, Pigface, and Murder Inc.

By the early 90s, though, Connelly had also launched a solo career: inspired by Scott Walker, David Bowie, and Robert Wyatt, he began embracing more eclectic orch-pop, glam, and singer-songwriter fare. The box set Wenders bought (one of a limited edition of 500 copies) collects his late-period solo discs for Invisible: 1997′s The Ultimate Seaside Companion (Revisited), 2001′s Blonde Exodus, 2002′s Private Education and the two-disc odds-and-sods set Initials C.C., 2004′s Night of Your Life, and a signed copy of last year’s Lounge Ax, Bottle, Elsewhere — ’94-’01, a mix of unreleased live and studio material. “It’s a nice appraisal of my tenure with the label,” he says. “Putting it together was like looking through an old photograph album.”

In a sense the box closes a chapter of Connelly’s career. For the past two years he’s been retooling his writing process, working on longer, more free-floating tunes that tinker with improvisation and unconventional song structures. He passed a home demo of some of that material earlier this year to Joan of Arc’s Tim Kinsella and Town and Country’s Ben Vida; the three had previously played together in Everyoned, an experimental group that also includes Town and Country’s Liz Payne and TV Pow’s Brent Gutzeit. “Tim and Ben, these were the go-to guys for me,” Connelly says. “They’re old friends, and I really like their approach to long-form and improvisational music.”

“He approached me and Ben, but he had the ideas pretty firmly realized,” says Kinsella. “He knew he wanted to make a record of these new songs that were really long and repetitive, that gave you time to sit and lose yourself in them. He was also excited about making a couple of the songs more like collages or abstract sound pieces. Mine and Ben’s job was really just to get him where he wanted to go.”

In the hopes of capturing a bit of the atmospheric vibe that Connelly was shooting for, Kinsella proposed recording part of the album outdoors. So in late June he, Connelly, Vida, and engineer Graeme Gibson hauled a Pro Tools rig and a host of instruments — cello, zither, bass, vibes, congas, and more — to a private campsite by Lake Wandawega, near Elkhorn, Wisconsin. They set up on a basketball court near the water. “It was set up like a normal studio, but with no roof,” Connelly says. “It created a really weird, strange ambience — a creepy, almost Blair Witch-y feel.”

On the first day the four men tested the equipment and tracked spare, sketchbook versions of the songs. The following day they brought in 11 more musicians, including Califone’s Ben Massarella, Make Believe’s Nate Kinsella, and Joan of Arc’s Todd Mattei and Joe Tricoli. They took multiple passes at each song, with most of the arrangements improvised or developed on the fly between takes. The only hiccup was the weather — on-and-off storms forced the musicians to stop and cover the equipment with garbage bags. “Anytime I would feel a drop of rain on my face, I was so paranoid about the mikes being ruined,” Connelly says. “But it gave my singing a real sense of urgency.”

A week after the Wisconsin trip, a smaller group reconvened at Bridgeport’s 4deuces studio for more recording, which involved cutting many of the songs from scratch one more time. “Most of the versions we did in the studio were one take,” says Connelly. “It’s a very rare situation where everyone is so unified about the purpose and understanding of the music that improv works so smoothly. We really lucked out.”

With Gibson’s assistance, Connelly, Kinsella, and Vida then took the nearly five hours’ worth of material and began merging tracks to create the album. “It was a little like editing a film would be, I imagine,” Connelly says. “You have a lot of choices to make about what takes to use, and the selection was very subjective. It all sounded good, but a record is only so long, so you have to make some hard decisions about what to use. Ultimately I think we ended up with something we’re all really proud of.” On the final album, titled The Episodes, Connelly’s usual compact lyrical forms are chucked in favor of long, winding verses — the three-part, 20-minute “Son of Empty Sam” was constructed out of more than an hour of material. The backing tracks are an ethereal mix of drones, repeating figures, and wistful melodies.

Connelly is currently shopping the album, which wrapped up around the same time he was finishing another project: a memoir of his early years in Chicago’s industrial-music scene. The book, tentatively titled “Concrete, Bulletproof, Invisible & Fried,” is due in February from SAF Publishing, a British company that has released books on the Soft Machine, Shirley Collins, and Suicide. Connelly describes it as part band diary, part fish-out-of-water tale, written in the spirit of Michael Winterbottom’s Factory Records biopic, 24-Hour Party People. “That movie brought humor into a musical situation that was viewed as very pompous and serious,” he says. “Similarly, what Ministry and the Revolting Cocks did was viewed as very serious and bloodcurdling and strict, but it was so goofy and so silly at the same time. I wanted to show that side as well.”

He’ll have plenty to keep him busy before the book comes out: he and his wife, filmmaker Shayna Connelly, are expecting their first child in October. He also wrote the score for Leftover Voices, a film his wife wrote and directed that she plans to begin showing on the festival circuit next year. He hopes to have The Episodes out by spring, and he’s confident it can find a home despite its unusual sound. “I actually think that’s actually going to help,” he says. “This is more radical than anything I’ve done, and in my mind more interesting.”

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