User:Zibethicus/Edge draft220608

Damon Edge was one of the two main musicians behind the influential space/cyberpunk/industrial band Chrome, who operated in the USA and Europe until Edge’s death in 1995. (A present-day version of Chrome is also operated irregularly by Chrome’s other principal, Helios Creed.)

Edge was born in Los Angeles, California on November 12 1949.^[1] He was adopted at birth and given the name Thomas Edward Wisse. He was epileptic as a child, and claimed to have his psychic abilities stimulated by his illness.^[2] He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Disney-founded California Institute of the Arts in the 1960s. He traveled to Morocco in the same period and was entranced by the music he heard there: “And suddenly, that night I started hearing it in my head with this really solid 4/4 beat behind it. And these songs were just coming to me. I was listening to this music in my head. And that’s when I conceived of the idea.” ^[3]

Edge became a founding member of the band Chrome in San Francisco in 1976, together with John Lambdin, Mike Low and Gary Spain. This line-up of Chrome released one album called The Visitation, which is regarded by many Chrome listeners as having little resemblance to the mature sound of the band. Edge is credited with playing guitar, synthesiser and drums on the album, which features Low’s high-pitched vocal stylings and fuzzed guitars in an kind of vaguely sci-fi/progressive series of songs with some spacey themes.

Mike Low did not continue with the band following this album, and a new guitarist was recruited, Helios Creed. With Creed’s arrival the other members of the band began to reduce their own commitments, and Lambdin and Spain are credited for only a few of the tracks on the next two albums, which may be Chrome’s best-known works, Alien Soundtracks (1978) and Half Machine Lip Moves (1979).

These two albums, which are often thought of as a unit and which were released on CD in that form, really demand the use of that overworked superlative, ‘unique’. Combining elements of the hard rock of the time with Edge’s earlier studies in abstract and experimental music, and adding in elements of psychedelic music and a use of abrasive synthesisers which predated the creation of the term ‘industrial’, the albums are now credited by many people with playing a part in the creation of that genre as well as several others such as ‘cyberpunk’.

Although Alien Soundtracks and Half Machine Lip Moves have now achieved legendary status, they were not so well received on release, being perhaps ahead of their time. But together with an appearance from Chrome on the Ralph Records compilation Subterranean Modern they did receive sufficient favourable attention for Chrome, working now as the duo of Edge and Creed, to be approached by the British label Beggar’s Banquet with a deal which resulted in the album Red Exposure, released to mixed reviews in 1980.

Any hopes which Chrome may have harboured for a greater exposure from this major-label release were not justified by the album’s mixed reception, and Chrome were released by Beggar’s Banquet following the release of the Inworlds 12” in 1981.

In 1980, Edge married the French singer Fabienne Shine. Edge had always retained a degree of control over his own releases by distributing them through his own label, Siren Records, and Chrome rapidly recovered from their flirtation with stardom. Recruiting the brothers John and Hilary Stench on bass and drums (fresh from the post-punk band Pearl Harbour and the Explosions), Damon began to restrict his contributions to vocals, synthesizers, occasional guitar work and productions, moving away from his previously characteristic hypomanic drumming.

With this four-person combo (and the occasional backing vocal from Ms Shine), Chrome proceeded to record a series of albums which have achieved a belated acclaim as classics of their kind: Blood on the Moon (1981), Third from the Sun (1982), and The Chronicles I and II (1982). These last two albums, a series of extended partly-instrumental ‘abstract’ tracks, were bundled together with Alien Soundtracks, Half Machine Lip Moves, Blood on the Moon and an album of mainly previously-released material, No Humans Allowed, to create the 6-LP release on Subterranean Records, The Chrome Box. This album, and its edited reissue as a 3-CD set from Cleopatra Records, now regularly fetch high prices on eBay and other venues.

In 1983, this period of Chrome’s existence came to an end, following some machinations which remain obscure. The official cause of the breakdown in relations between Edge and Creed was the question of touring; in the whole course of their comparatively long existence to this point, Chrome played live exactly twice, the first show being in Bologna, Italy in July 1981 followed by another show in San Francisco in August 1981 (recordings exist of both these events). Creed wanted to play live, Edge did not. Edge wanted to move to Europe; Creed did not. Following a acrimonious split, Edge moved to Berlin and then to Paris with his wife. Edge had always been a heavy user of psychedelic drugs, but according to Ms Shine, it was in this period that he began the heavy use of heroin and alcohol which is supposed to have contributed to his early death.^[4] Creed remained in the USA, and commenced work on his successful solo career, which continues to this day and is fully documented elsewhere.

Damon then recruited members of his wife’s studio band for work on his own projects. Retaining the rights to the name ‘Chrome’, the new material was sparser and darker than the more bombastic, upbeat ‘American Chrome’, and the merits or otherwise of ‘French Chrome’ remains a subject of much debate among admirers of this band. The absence of Creed’s trademark snarling, buzzing, wildly overdriven metal-psychedelic lead guitar led to a less guitar-focused sound and simpler song structures. The resulting series of albums heavily featured electronic percussion and somewhat smoother sounds; they include Into the Eyes of the Zombie King (1984), Eternity and Another World (both 1985) and Liquid Forest (1990). In this time, Edge also released a number of albums in his own name, among them The Wind is Talking (1985) and Grand Visions (1986).

These ‘post-Creed’ recordings came out on a variety of labels, particularly Edge’s own Siren label and the German Dossier Records, but despite the ‘cleaner’ sound, the considerable output (which suggests that Edge was far from being a quasi-derelict junkie in this period as sometimes claimed) and live shows in France and Germany, mainstream recognition continued to elude Edge, possibly partly due to the continued darkness and alienation of his thematic material, as well as his distinctive cover-art collages which often feature disembodied giant eyes in bleak dystopian landscapes cluttered with discarded high-tech equipment and/or magnified portions of the dissected images of magazine models.

His marriage to Ms Shine ended in the early 90s, and Edge returned to America. His musical output entered a hiatus, which was ended in 1994 when Edge released his final album, The Clairaudient Syndrome. By this time, Edge was reportedly severely depressed over the end of his marriage, morbidly obese and a heavy drinker and drug user^[5]. He had become highly reclusive – perhaps as a consequence of the aggravation of his long-standing agoraphobia – and he was found dead in his Los Angeles apartment on August 11 1995 from renal failure^[6]. His body had lain undiscovered for nearly a month until neighbours called police. Edge’s strange odyssey was over at the age of 45, but his music lives on.

Edge’s estate is administered by his adoptive sister, Sharon Wisse Magruder, and legal ramifications regarding the rights to the Chrome name and back catalogue have been continuing to this day. Helios Creed, by this time a well-established artist in his own right, collaborated posthumously with Edge by finishing some of his incomplete recordings, a project which was released as Angel of the Clouds in 2001. Members of Creed’s band purchased Edge’s Moog Liberation ‘keytar’ synthesizer from the Edge estate, and Creed and his band members occasionally perform Chrome material under his own and the Chrome name.

It is difficult to quantify the impact which Chrome has had on contemporary bands, but it is at least noteworthy that they began recording before the term ‘Industrial Music’ became a genre-descriptive in its own right, and it would be difficult to deny that few contemporary industrial bands have not been influenced by the unique vision of Damon Edge.

• Damon Edge memorial website
• Official Chrome website
• A Damon Edge MySpace site