Chicks on Speed Are on a Lark

Pop quiz: Name the sassy, fake, all-female trio with the wildest look and most anticommercial message to hit the radar screen this year.

No, it’s not Josie & the Pussycats. It’s Chicks on Speed.

An imaginary band conceived in 1997 by three Munich-based artists as part of a multimedia project, Chicks on Speed has evolved into an actual band, or, more properly, a quirky electronic-music act. They even have a campy theme song, their own warped version of Cracker’s “Euro Trash Girl.” Not to mention a product-pushing Web site, a new album and a maiden U.S tour, which brings them to the Knitting Factory on Friday and Saturday.

But New Yorker Melissa Logan, Sydney-born Alex Murray-Leslie and Munich native Kiki Moorse probably won’t be endorsing diet soda any time soon. What started as their commentary on modern pop-music marketing has become a Devo-esque, goofy-yet-provocative, do-it-yourself cultural collective that advocates a hands-on approach to entertaining yourself, as opposed to just absorbing whatever comes down the corporate pike.

“People should stop buying from big companies,” says Murray-Leslie. “They should create their own small companies and do stuff themselves.”

Also, they say, don’t be intimidated by a lack of professional know-how. The Chicks work together, making their own paper and leather outfits as well as collages and other art-installation-type pieces for their elaborate stage sets. “If it’s a bigger thing, then we collaborate with a lot of people to do it,” Logan explains.

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Indeed, since none of the three is a musician, Chicks on Speed’s music is unabashedly producer-driven. Yet the group’s Molotov cocktail of ‘80s-era pop, electronic dance, spoken word and hair-raising dissonance is a lot more “theirs” than the generic sentiments mouthed by a thousand dancing young vocal groups.

True, the tracks on the band’s U.S. debut album, “The Re-Releases of the Unreleases”--a composite of two European collections and other material--can be downright cacophonous. But there’s a quirky appeal to the cut-and-paste versions of such new-wave classics as the Normal’s “Warm Leatherette,” as well as to such originals as the tongue-in-cheek house track “Glamour Girl.”

Originally, they set out only to portray a mainstream group of performers whose work is massaged by producers and whose ideas come from label executives. Except in reality, Logan says: “We were the ones pulling the strings.”

They made up a box of merchandise for their fake group, and “performed” recorded live shows. In an early presentation titled “I Wanna Be a DJ, Baby,” Moorse says, the three women stood be hind turntables and manipulated records, but the actual music was a taped sound collage they had put together. “The people actually thought we were DJ’ing, even though it was so obvious we weren’t,” Moorse says with a laugh. “We would’ve had to change the records really fast!”

“But after a couple of times, it was like, ‘Enough of that, on to the next phase,’ ” Logan says.

Their performances had attracted the attention of some real producer-DJs, and soon they were hashing out a new brand of art-rock with such European experimental-electronica gurus as Tobi Neumann, Ramon Bauer and Gerhard Potuznik.

“We prepare texts,” Moorse explains, “and the producers prepare a rough outline of what the song could sound like, with a beat, and maybe a couple of samples.” In the studio they record vocals, put everything together, and then, often, take it apart and put it back together a different way.

It was Bauer who suggested the trio record a version of the B-52’s’ “Give Me Back My Man.” Moorse recalls balking at first. “I really hated what they did in ‘The Flintstones,’ ” she says. “But we listened to their old albums, and I thought, ‘Oh, these tracks are so way-cool, we have to do this.’ ”

Indeed, persuasion is half the battle with this group.

“It’s about convincing [each other] and finding the best way,” Logan says. “That’s good, because we don’t get comfortable or lazy. We have to keep on making an effort.”

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* Chicks on Speed, Saturday and Sunday at the Knitting Factory Hollywood, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., L.A., 8 p.m. $12. (323) 463-0204.