Chrome
Half Machine Lip Moves

San Francisco, late '70s. The "industrial" civilization is now a monstrously existing reality, progress begins to advance at a dizzying pace, the first personal computers are born, trust in machines increases immeasurably, the prevailing color is gray, the color of twilight, of the inertia born from the white of faith and the black of death. We are leaving the "flower power" period, and like all epochal changes, there is a climate of bewilderment, in one word, "alienation." A word much abused but incredibly pertinent in describing realities like this. The Chrome were children of this reality. Their music is the "drawing" of that reality. And like all respectable artists, they use their art as a means to express a state of mind, as an instrument of "avant-garde" (in the sense of looking ahead, beyond the immediate appearance, which is the true role of the intellectual).

Thus they created with Half Machine Lip Moves, not only one of the best albums in the history of rock but also a work tremendously important on a level of "historical testimony". With them (and even earlier with the English Throbbing Gristle), "industrial" music emits its first cries. And it could not be otherwise.
To express their discomfort, the Chrome produce a sound that is abnormal, monstrous, very little musical. Their pieces are collages of sounds assembled often randomly, using everything that can "sound," it doesn't matter how and why; the important thing is to disturb, to provoke a slow and inexorable cerebral neurosis, to lead the listener to flee from this heap of sonic debris. Within the album, one hears everything: acidic distortions, exhausting feedback, dissonances, "concrete" noises, treated voices, tortured and torturing electronics. The rhythm is often mechanical (a trademark of all the industrial to come), nervous, broken, with dizzying progressions and sudden pauses. Everything seems random (and often it is, considering many "digressions" were improvised at the time of recording), exhausting confusion that stuns. And in the end, it succeeds, well before the album is over.

Mission accomplished, the objective of Chrome was precisely this, to monstrously emphasize the situation they were living in, to lead the listener between presses, gears, pistons, and microchips, in such an "inhuman" and annoying way to slap him in the face, to vomit his reality on him. In our case "that" reality, "that" moment. As for our moment, it’s better to skip over it.