By Curtis P. Ferree
Arizona Daily Wildcat
October 9, 1997

Melted Men are Hot Stuff

Dan Hoffman Arizona Daily Wildcat Members of the Melted Men Chris Cogan (right) and Kenny Aguar (left) perform at Club Congress Sunday night. Cogan spins records while Aguar adds percussion sounds and runs the mixing board.

by Curtis P. Ferree

If you missed Melted Men at Club Congress on Sunday night, you missed a show which might not be seen again in Tucson for quite some time.

The duo, from Athens, GA., are touring in support of their latest release, Flame Retarded (self-produced on Rainbow of Decay Records). To label them as performance artists doesn't do justice to the quality of their music, and to label them a rock band is to undermine the uniqueness of what they do. In other words, they defy labels.

But that's the point, really. Their music is a hybrid of everything under the sun. They pull samples from commercials, bird songs and everything in between to create what band member Kenny Aguar calls a "sonic collage."

Their "instrumentation" is largely two turntables, a mixing board and an assortment of electronic gadgets. Chris Cogan, the other half of the Melted Men, handles most of the vocals and runs the turntables, changing records like a man possessed. Aguar mans the mixing board and adds backing vocals and percussion effects. Of their music, Cogan says, "It's all kinds of music, but all at once ... a carnival of degeneration." He adds that they use cut-up methods to deconstruct sounds, building something different in their place.

The Melted Men's stage show creates a feeling of the absurd. Aguar spends most of the show in a warlock mask and black cape while Cogan dons a flesh colored ski mask, black cape and straw hat. The costumes catch the audience off-guard visually in the same way the music does aurally. The result is a careful blend of fine showmanship and a self-effacing quality that creates an atmosphere that is spontaneous, entertaining and often funny. At one point during the show, Cogan came from behind a screen dressed as Kenny Rogers, "The Gambler" playing in the background and proceeded to tell us "a story about some damn lies" in regards to Rogers' chicken restaurants. What followed was a half-spoken-word, half-cover-version of the song that had the audience laughing out loud.

For another song, Aguar, who had run off the stage, returned wearing a gorilla costume with one blinking red eye and sang "Strangers in the Night," which, Cogan informed us in the voice of a circus showman, was to help him get over a junior high school girl dumping him.

"It's very important to keep the audience active. We're very interested in entertainment and plagiarism," Cogan said.

"In our shows we're pretty much going for the ultra-camp," Aguar adds.

Although they have a few things they repeat from show to show, the Melted Men insist that they never really rehearse. Their performance has an air of spontaneity that reflects this. Like good jazz, Aguar and Cogan work within a groove, improvising what ever might be right for the moment. This goes for the music as well as the on stage banter between the two - banter that fit the music, sometimes like rap, sometimes like spoken word.

"When we're going through a town and something inspires us, we try and incorporate [it]," said Aguar.

The Melted Men first got together in the fall of '95, under the name Cocktail Sauce Boat. They changed the name to the Melted Men a few days before their first show. They have released three records to date, and produced each one themselves. The first two, Breathe the Gas and The Sheets are Soaked, were released on Champagne Audio.

The band admits that their recordings are often more experimental than their live shows. But they try and keep the same, live feel to the music, even going so far as to record in costume. They confessed that they recorded one of the tracks on Flame Retarded in the nude, but want to "leave it to the audience" to figure out which one.

Preceding the Melted Men show were two short, 16mm films, and a lecture by performance artist and lepidoptera enthusiast Irene Moon. Moon spoke about the stinging hairs of lepidoptera larvae, as she showed mixed-media slides to the sounds of Lawrence Welk. Moon is also from Athens, where she attended the graduate program for entomology at the University of Georgia. All of the information in her lectures is accurate, and comes complete with handouts.

Dan Hoffman Arizona Daily Wildcat Melted Man Chris Cogan (dressed as Kenny Rogers) leads the crowd in a very unique version of the song "The Gambler."

Moon said her performance is an exaggeration of the lectures she attended at the university. She takes bits and pieces from many professors to arrive at her stage personae. For the show, she wore a '60s short dress with plastic gloves, and used a butterfly net as a pointer. Her hair was teased easily a foot and a half above her head. It is her hyperbolic delivery, combined with elements of '60s camp, that made her performance both interesting, and a valid commentary that anyone who has ever sat through a lecture can appreciate.

Moon made one of the short films that was screened, "Insectivore," and Cogan made the second, "Electrotreat." Moon met the Melted Men when they visited her lab in Athens. She developed the formula for turning Aguar into the Tick Man, another of his on-stage personas.

"It's kind of like a sandwich," Aguar says of the relationship between the films, Moon's performance, and the Melted Men show. "She's the meat, and we're the bread. It makes for an interesting package."

"It's an educational extravaganza for audiences of every kind," Cogan added.

Anyone interested in finding out more about the Melted Men can write to: Melted Men International Headquarters, P.O. Box 211, Athens, GA 30603.