DENIM AND DIAMONDS, STREET MEDI ...

Introducing: the product, “Street Medics Unite!� The first EP from New York’s spazmelodic Denim and Diamonds. A Bloodlink Records 5� enhanced CD with eight songs and three music videos pulsing with dystopian imagery, analog savagery, triumphant hiccups of post-corporate calls to action and pop songs buried beneath hundreds of thorny microscopic loops.
Denim and Diamonds may be the first band since Black Flag to have a FBI file. The band is the collaboration of two shadowy anti-corporate, electronic media saboteurs. Both have more aliases than there are names in the Marfa, Texas phone book, but in Denim and Diamonds, they’re Squiggy Diamonds and Marcel Denim.
Squiggy is the vocalist. Onstage, he’s an asexual (but not desexualized), post apocalyptic performance artist who puts the “show� back in performance by challenging the divide between audience and performer. No two Denim and Diamonds shows are ever the same and some have resulted in mass audience confusion. Marcel is the programmer of sound and a whimsical mad scientist who builds digital, mathematical signal processors for studio and performance.
The resulting musique pop is a over stimulated world of megalopic corporations, resourceful, technologically enhanced “street medics,� and glitch ridden transmissions from the future, one possible future.
“We write songs as if we were writing on an acoustic guitar. Squiggy and I come up with melodies and lyrics, then build the rest around them.� Marcel explains.
This could be the reason that music made by men with technology, about technology and man, could be so resonant in both fields. This is not a record of cold hooks, but of a bloodied human socket, out of which peers one glowing electronic eye. This record is a storm on man and machine, one anxious sigh, before one cannot live without the other.
Lest Denim and Diamonds seem like new school philosophers of William Gibson-esque cyberpunk, the imagery they use is a satirical undercarriage for the political, anti-corporate agenda they practice in their other art. Two of the EP’s tracks, “Disneyland in Iraq� and “The Meaning of Things,� directly or indirectly comment (even presuppose) the tone of contemporary media attention to the war in Iraq.
Some music is just made, the creation of divine intervention and blind, stubborn talent. Some music is calculated, designed, and built. The music of Denim and Diamonds is; definitely a construction, but built out of organic need, the need for self-survival and hard, satirical criticism.