Chicks on Speed is a feminist music and fine art ensemble, formed in Munich in 1997, when members Australian Alex Murray-Leslie and American Melissa Logan met at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.[1][2]

Though Chicks on Speed reached cult status throughout the 2000s as catalysts of the musical genre electroclash, Chicks on Speed were actually founded and more broadly, performed as a multidisciplinary art group working in performance art, electronic dance music, collage graphics, textile design and fashion.


 

Co-founders, Melissa Logan and Alex Murray-Leslie were art students at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, when they met in 1997 at one of the Academy's parties.[1]

Murray-Leslie then invited Logan to join an illegal bar she founded, named "Seppi Bar" that same year. Logan and Murray-Leslie began working as a group at Seppi Bar to create art exhibitions and host illegal parties.[1]

Murray-Leslie founded "Seppi Bar", which was originally named "Maria Bar" earlier, in 1994, with friends Barbara and Karl Fritsch, she later changed the name to "Seppi Bar" in 1996. It was a nomadic ArtBar around Munich that lasted 3 years. It was a project based on the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich where Dada artists met and performed.

After a seminar by Roberto Ohrt on the Situationist International Logan asked Murray-Leslie to leave the lecture and in the hallway said they should be an art collective, a large radical group but without the boss structure of Guy Debord, they would be a collective with equal leadership, horizontal. Later Logan and Kiki Moorse met through their Japanese boyfriends. Moorse came from fashion, formally an editor at Condé Nast. Moorse was a performer in an early Chicks on Speed video (Für die Bessere Welt/ for the better world, Seppi welt ist besser/ (a member until 2006 now on Toffeetones Records), after which she invited her to join Chicks on Speed. In this period, Murray-Leslie worked with Upstart at the techno nightclub Ultraschall working the door, curating live-art events and interior media art installations.[3] This meeting with Upstart (Label owner of Disko B) would see the medium of music merge with the Chicks' multimedia explorations.

Chicks on Speed created a live-art piece named I Wanna Be A DJ...Baby!. They stood behind DJ decks and smashed records while a sound collage tape was playing. For this project they also put together a "box set" with a T-shirt, a cassette, a paper record and a fake interview for their "band". During this time they met Upstart (a.k.a. Peter Wacha) of Disko B record label who joined their freshly started record label, Go Records, which later become Chicks on Speed Records with Jeurgen Söder. Go Records was a suicide label—the release numbers started at 10 and went down to zero; the motto was, perhaps what is wrong with the world is that things are made to grow & get bigger. The 10 releases were primarily limited edition 7" and 10" records that sold out fast.


In an interview with Undertheradar.co.nz, Melissa Logan, a founding and current member stated, "We are humanists. Feminism is a small and at the same time a great part of this. Besides the obvious deserved rights for females through sexual equality, equality offers white males a way out of the white male oppressor role." Logan states that their political activism is a form of feminism and that their form of feminism does not have to fit into a box. She asserts, "We were confused and aggressive: what do you mean, we’re feminists? We’re just making our work. And then, at the time, I had a really political boyfriend, who said, yes, you guys are really political, if you’re not feminists you can’t do what you want to do. It doesn’t mean that there’s a definition and you have to fit with it – you can make your own definition of it – and then it was oh yeah."