On tour for Future Music Festival, Chicks on Speed held a workshop at L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival, called Collaboration in Design: Fashion as Song.

Chicks on Speed use the term “artistic multi-tasking” to refer to a project history that includes music, art, performance, video, a record label and apparel design. Their manic versatility characterises their work: cut-out sounds with fraying edges layered on top of one another, theatrical performance with colourful costumes, video footage assembled from images of past work and eye-catching incidents (such as model Heidi Klum tumbling over on the catwalk). In a COS show everything happens at once and comes from every direction.

At the Australian Centre for the Moving Image for their Fashion Week workshop, COS members Alex Murray-Leslie, Melissa Logan and Kathi Glass decorated the stage with a pretty mess of tulle, paint boxes, and musical instruments. For the next hour they used a combination of video, graphics, live music and speech to tell the story of past work, evoke their methods and inspire versatility.

“We often get asked in when people have run out of ideas,” Alex tells me. “We try to show people that you can be DIY and produce things yourself.”

Was that the message for L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Week?

“It’s obviously a branded event, and it’s a pity that there isn’t more crossover between the cultural and the commercial programs. I think we had an audience of progressive designers and design students, but we would have liked to see more fashion industry people.” Yet Alex concedes, “It’s good there is money from the Victorian Government for a cultural and education program. They have opened the festival up to the public. It’s not always like that.”

For COS the exchange between fashion and music is so compelling they even wrote a track called Sewing Machine. Of course there are other music artists who make the connection.

With rap stars like Kanye West wanting to start their own fashion line, is there are trend toward musicians producing clothing to compensate for declining album sales, due to free downloading over the internet?

We have always made lots of things,” says Alex, before Melissa interrupts, “But maybe in some way, we have been working on this record now for the past three years and we wonder does anyone even listen to records anymore, who buys them, what is the point?”

Have MySpace and iTunes changes the music industry?

“MySpace has in some ways,” says Alex. “It used to be that bands would be booked for a festival about even months in advance, now it’s more like two months in advance. It really sped up all the production cycles. Now bands can get big and be booked for shows without even having released a album or a single – just through what they’ve put up on MySpace.”

Has it changed the audience to your music?

“We find that when we are being written about and promoted in New Music Express, we will have all these – œjaded trendies’ coming to our gigs, and when we were getting press in this trashy German Bravo Magazine we had a lot of young people coming along to see us,” Melissa answers. “Your publicity always affects your audience,” adds Alex.

How did you establish a structure that would let you work on multiple projects?

Melissa: “We also had a lot of arguments. We were thinking will have these different departments and different systems, and that is when we lost Kiki [Moorse].”

Recruited by founding members Alex and Melissa, Kiki Moorse left several years ago to pursue a solo career as a DJ and music producer. COS’s independent record label features artists such as Le Tigre, Kevin Blechdom, DAT Politics and Angie Reed, allowing more flexibility for touring and work on art and design projects. They include working with Designers Against AIDS and European retail giant H & M, making t-shirts for Fashion Against Aids – a campaign to appeal to the people aged under 24 who are most at risk of infection with AIDS.

In the future, COS want to continue performing and working with music and audio-visual media. They are working with Melbourne shop Third Drawer Down on home wares. And Alex wants to design a couch. “I went shopping recently and the only one I liked was about $10,000, so I might as well just make one myself.” A couch Chicks on Speed style? Look out for one that doubles as a musical instrument, on stage in one of their next shows.

For details of upcoming shows and projects check the Chicks on Speed MySpace or website.