The American proto-industrial band, founded one year before Throbbing Gristle. The band runs the F·16 sound through Damon Edge's tape composition and Helios Creed's distorted guitar. Half Machine Lip Moves the masterpiece.
Chrome was founded in 1975 in San Francisco by Damon Edge (born Thomas Wisse, 1948, Los Angeles), at first as a fairly conventional rock band, with John Lambdin on guitar and Mike Low on bass alongside Edge on drums and vocals. The original line-up's debut LP The Visitation (1976, on Siren Records, the band's own label) is quite distinct from what came after · mostly song-form rock with proto-industrial textures, closer to the American underground rock of the day than to the industrial sound Chrome would help establish after 1977. The Bureau files The Visitation as the pre-Creed Chrome; the band proper begins with Helios Creed's arrival in 1977.
Helios Creed (born Barry Schwam) joined in 1977, Lambdin and Low leaving around the same time. The Edge / Creed duo is the band's foundation from this point on; the main Chrome catalogue runs across 1977 to 1982 with the two as its writers. Creed's distorted guitar · out front, rejecting the clean electric-guitar sound and treating distortion, effects and feedback as the primary material rather than colour · lies at the heart of the mature sound. The band's argument is that the electric guitar can carry the post-industrial mode the F·11 first wave had mostly worked through electronics.
Alien Soundtracks (1977, Siren) is the breakthrough LP and the founding statement. It catches the Edge / Creed partnership at the moment the sound comes together · Edge's tape collage as the structural base, Creed's distorted guitar as the main foreground. The science-fiction lyrics, the technological paranoia and the post-Burroughs inheritance sit inside the writing as material rather than decoration; the album's argument is that industrial composition can work in song form while standing outside the conventional rock band. The Bureau treats Alien Soundtracks as a marker for the F·16 industrial rock/metal that develops after 1977; the band is effectively established here.
Half Machine Lip Moves (1979, Siren) is the masterpiece. It catches the Edge / Creed sound at full maturity · the sound set, capable of long pieces alongside short sharp ones, F·16 at album scale. The main tracks (TV as Eyes, Critical Mass, March of the Chrome Police, the title track) work the mature sound across quite different pieces, on the claim that the band can hold the whole scope of F·16 industrial rock/metal inside one LP. The Bureau holds it as the band's reference record and one of the founding LPs of the form; what follows (Ministry from 1986, Nine Inch Nails from 1989, the American industrial rock of the late 1980s and 1990s) builds on it.
After Half Machine Lip Moves come Red Exposure (1980), Blood on the Moon (1981) and 3rd from the Sun (1982), the mature album-form work. Red Exposure is the most song-shaped of them, closer to structured rock than before, with the tape collage and distorted guitar held inside songs rather than carrying the whole. Blood on the Moon and 3rd from the Sun extend the mature sound across the closing Edge / Creed years, staying close to Half Machine Lip Moves while each works its own songs.
The 1983 split matters for what came next. Edge moved to Paris in 1983, the Chrome name continuing mainly as his solo vehicle with rotating collaborators through to 1995. The post-1983 records (Into the Eyes of the Zombie King 1984, Another World 1986, and the rest of the 1983–1994 run) are distinct from the Edge / Creed work · mostly Edge's solo tape and electronics, closer to the European experimental scene than to the American band of 1977 to 1982. The Bureau treats the post-1983 Edge-period Chrome as distinct from the main Edge / Creed catalogue, though not far outside what that period had established.
Creed's solo career runs alongside from about 1985. His main solo LP X-Rated Fairy Tales (1985, Subterranean) is the statement of his post-Chrome sound · the distorted guitar kept out front, the science-fiction lyrics and post-Burroughs frame carried from Chrome into solo work. His later solo records (Superior Catholic Finger 1989, The Last Laugh 1991, and on across 1985 to the present) hold the mature sound. It is continuous with Chrome's 1977 to 1982 work while being its own.
Damon Edge died in 1995 in Paris, closing the Edge-period band. The Bureau notes the death plainly, without commentary · the Edge-period work closes at that date, and later Chrome-name activity is Creed's rather than a continuation of the Edge / Creed partnership. Creed's reconstituted Chrome since 1995 (several LPs through to the present, with rotating line-ups) carries the sound into the present while standing apart from the original Edge / Creed work.
Chrome's influence runs right across F·16 industrial rock/metal after 1982. Ministry's work from 1986 (Twitch 1986, The Land of Rape and Honey 1988, The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste 1989) builds on what Chrome set down in 1977 to 1982 · the distorted guitar, the tape collage, the science-fiction and paranoia, the song forms worked over with industrial textures all carry through. Nine Inch Nails from 1989 likewise builds on the F·16 ground Chrome helps lay, as does the American industrial rock of the late 1980s and 1990s (Skinny Puppy, the Wax Trax! roster, and the surrounding field that becomes contemporary F·16).
Where Chrome sits: the main American proto-industrial band; predating the UK first wave by about a year; distinct from the F·11 first wave (its rock-band base and song forms set it apart from the more electronics-based first wave); foundational for F·16 industrial rock/metal after 1979; close to the post-1968 American counterculture (the post-Hawkwind science-fiction lyrics, the post-Burroughs writing, the San Francisco experimental scene); and continuous with Krautrock and Kosmische through its German inheritance. The Edge / Creed partnership of 1977 to 1982 is the central work; Edge's death in 1995 (Paris) closes the Edge-period band; Creed's continuing solo and reconstituted Chrome carry the sound into the present.