Braindead Soundmachine was an American industrial rock band founded by Cole Coonce, Warren Croyle ("Mr. Reality"),[1] and Lee Howell ("Ikky Shivers"). Eschewing the industrial genre, the band coined the term "metaldisco" in reference to their musical style.
After Coonce and Howell quit the Long Beach art-rock band Outer Circle in 1984, they founded Braindead Soundmachine in Los Angeles, California, United States, in 1989 with speed metal record producer Croyle. The trio conceptualized "metaldisco," a genre that melded Black Sabbath riffs topped by disco rhythm guitar and ethereal female vocals. The sound was rounded out by Shivers, a Los Angeles sound engineer, whose aural contribution consisted of non-musical screeching noises coerced from his collections of refurbished vintage analog synthesizers.
Following Coonce's edict that "singers are like spark plugs, you screw them in and then you screw them out," Braindead utilized the services of sundry female vocalists, including those of Joan Jones from Sun 60, Khalsoum Salloum and JenJen (Jenny Homer from Downy Mildew[2]).
The band followed a simple ethos that "there are no mistakes",[3] with only one rule: "no chord changes."[3]
The band's approach to making music was also informed by its insistence that Yoshi, a Japanese transgender woman working as a cocktail waitress in East Hollywood, was in fact "Dogvillasan," a deity (or "Coyote God") summoned by the group in the song of the same name.[4]
In 1990, and with the band's theology, philosophy and musical approach finalized, Braindead procured a recording contract with Chicago's Wax Trax! Records, which put out the band's first long-playing compact disc, Come Down from the Hills and Make My Baby.
In 1992, Coonce scored the Greg Araki indie film The Living End, a queer road movie that also featured Braindead's version of the Jesus and Mary Chain song that gave the film its title.
As Wax Trax! began to succumb to an eventual collapse and bankruptcy, Braindead sought to extricate itself from their contract.
The group disbanded in 1994 during pre-production for its never-released third album, after Mr. Reality suggested taking the band's ethos of only using one chord per composition into further musical deconstruction by mandating new songs use only "one note," an idea that Coonce found unworkable.
After its creative collapse, the three founding members quit music and procured employment as sound engineers in game shows and the adult film industry, as documented in Coonce's memoirs about the music business, released in 2005 and also entitled Come Down from the Hills and Make My Baby.[6]
In 1995, the band re-grouped for its final musical endeavor, recording the source music in Dan Zukovic's cult film The Last Big Thing. With its scathing satirical attack on the entertainment culture of Los Angeles, the film's ethos is quite similar to Braindead's.
Eventually Coonce changed occupations and became a freelance drag strip journalist of some renown,[7] writing for publications as varied as National Dragster,[8]Hot Rod Magazine and WIRED. This pursuit peaked with feature-length book on the history of the land speed record, Infinity Over Zero.[9]
In 2007, JenJen collaborated with Coonce in a new musical venture entitled Prozac Pop Machine. Their first single is "Shampoo" and is currently available podcast-only.[10]
Croyle is now CEO of the multi-media conglomerate Reality Entertainment.[11] Originally an outlet for ponderous and aggressive speed metal bands, in 2006 Reality signed seminal disco music stars KC and the Sunshine Band to a recording contract, a move which Croyle heralded by stating that: "KC has affected generations of music lovers around the world, we are thrilled to have KC on the Reality roster." It could be argued that with its signing of KC and The Sunshine Band, and by finally synergistically melding heavy metal with disco, Reality Entertainment succeeded where Braindead failed. Ikky Shivers died in June, 2001.
Musical style
In interviews, Braindead has never been shy about citing their influences. They employed N.W.A's hip hop drum machine sound, Black Sabbath's bass lines and the guitar stylings of Chic, Fela Kuti and Funkadelic. The floaty, dreamy and drolly defiant female vocals are reminiscent of Julee Cruise and Lesley Gore.
"Where the Pavement Ends" b/w "Soon Come, Goddammit" (Artlos, 1993)
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