Photo courtesy of Mark G.E.
Cyberchump
Cyberchump
How many albums has Cyberchump released? Sixteen? Although they maintain a low profile, the Milwaukee-Kansas City duo have released a steady stream (a torrent?) of instrumental, electronic albums since 2000, shaping trippy beats and synth melodies into artisanal sounds that don’t sacrifice humanity for technology. On their 2013 album Flutter and Flow, the clicking drumbeat was an iPhone recording of windshield wipers. Guitar was filtered through unique effects boxes and oddball drones were emitted from a DIY synthesizer.
The latest by multi-instrumentalists-sonic engineers Mark G.E. and Jim Skeel, Forming, is more minimal than usual its pieces composed with only four to six tracks, much of it unconventionally generated. G.E. used handheld instruments, such as the Korg Monotron keyboard and an app, called Nodebeat, producing electronic tones and pulses that serve as mellow, soft-toned rhythms,” G.E. says. “The premise of Cyberchump has always been mood and movement. We do ambient music, but it always has a groove, even if it’s ripples on water.”
Cyberchump has never performed live. Skeel met G.E. when the latter’s Kansas City sojourn in the ‘90s, and when G.E. returned to Milwaukee, their collaboration became entirely long distance, facilitated by uploading and adding (subtracting?) with each other’s musical files. “We are free to alter each other’s tracks, and when we do, neither of us is insulted. For us, everything is malleable,” G.E. insists.
They’ve never taken their music on the road, but Cyberchump tracks were picked up early on by Pandora and have attracted interest from unusual precincts. According to G.E., Cyberchump’s music forms the sonic backdrop for home improvement shows and 911 calls in several major cities. As a result, royalties have been steady. They have also provided the score for several movies, including Milwaukee filmmaker Ross Bigeley’s Zombie Frathouse.
In 2016, after the release of The Construction of Things, the duo considered calling quits. “‘That’s it for us,’ we thought,” G.E. recalls. “But a year later, Jim sent me some tracks, and I sent him some tracks, and the result was the 2018 album After—as in, ‘After we’re done.’”
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However, with Quirks of the Zen Dog (2021), Cyberchump compiled loose ends for what was intended as a wrap-up album. But then the muse began whispering … Will Forming be Cyberchump’s finale? “Yes!” G.E. declares, perhaps a bit too insistently.
For a member of such a mellow duo, G.E. is a tireless dynamo of energy. His main musical project, the new wave Devo-inspired XPosed 4Heads, will release an album this spring recorded live at 2022’s Lest We Forget at Turner Hall. His other band, Electricity Kills, plays at Camp Karma in West Allis on March 7. For Club Garibaldi’s Spoof Fest on April 10, G.E. and fellow 4Head Kelp Chofs will join Mixtape for a set of B-52s covers. “You guessed it, I’m Fred Schneider,” G.E. says. And on May 1, G.E. will stage a new event, Fun Fest, at Shotzy 2 in West Allis, featuring XPosed 4Heads, the Brewtown Beat ska band and DJ Nikki Spudnikk, spinning Weird Al Yankovich between sets.
