Music:
Member Since: 2/7/2007
Band Website: chelonis.com
Influences:
"If you don't stand for something
... You'll fall for ANYTHING!" - CRJ
CHEography : life
AMERICAN ARTIST LEFT NEW YORK TO LAND UPON
EUROPE’S DOORSTEP IN ORDER TO PERSUE A
CHARMING CAREER IN THE WORLD OF ART...
ARMED WITH PAINTBRUSHES -UNPUBLISHED
MANUSCRIPTS... SONGS&POEMS, HE DECIDED TO
COMMIT HIMSELF FULLY TO THE VITRIOLIC WORLD
OF THE STRUGGLING ARTIST -AND THEIR
SOMETIMES FRUITFUL PLIGHT.
WORKING AS SONGWRITER - AND PLAYING SONG-
WRITER/VOCALIST IN 23 ROCK/POPGROUPS AND
PULLING OF A HANDFUL OF SMALL ARTSHOWS
FOR HIS PAINTINGS WERE HARDLY UNUSUAL.
STRUGGLES WERE MANY--- PENURY, USUAL....
AND HOMELESSNESS --- OBVIOUS BUT HEY, DIDN’T
SINATRA SAY “IF I CAN MAKE IT THERE... I’LL MAKE
IT ANYWHERE” ?
BUT SOMEONE ELSE SAID “REWARD YOURSELF...
YOUR -SELF - HOLDS REWARDS -SO BE YOURSELF!”
2001 HE WAS INTRODUCED&SIGNED TO GET PHYSICAL
FROM THE START. HIS 1ST 2002 RELEASE “ONE&ONE”
(A COLLABORATION WITH M.A.N.D.Y.& BOOKA SHADE
- AND A 1ST EVER TELEVISED LIVE RADIOSHOW
PERFORMANCE WITH THE LEGENDARY DJ T.
FOLLOWED SHORT AFTER) STARTED THE BALL
ROLLING (THE 1ST ISSUE 12”
DISPLAYING HIS OWN
COVER ART).
2003 BROUGHT FORTH “I DON’T KNOW?” WHICH
TOPPED THE BELGIUM DANCE CHARTS TWICE!
AND PUT THE ARTIST ON THE MAP... WITH
THOUSANDS OF BROKEN-HEARTS TO
RESPOND&RELATE.
2005 IGNITED THE SELF-PRODUCED, CONTROVERSIAL
LO-FI MASTERPIECE“DISLOCATED GENIUS” -WHICH
ALSO
DONS AN ORIGINAL CANVAS-WORK COVER-
WE SHAN’T
GET INTO THE
POLITICS OF THAT
COVER... THIS IS NOT
THE TIME,
NOR THE PLACE.
AFTER COUNTLESS SHOWS... FEATURINGS... DRAMAS...
AND OBVIOUS MOUNTAIN
CLIMBING
2007 SEEMS TO BE
THE MOMENT FOR THE LONG-AWAITED FOLLOW-UP
-ENTITLED: “CHATTERTON” ---THERE HAS BEEN MUCH
DEBATE ON THE MEANING&
CONTENT,
BUT WE SHAN’T
DELVE INTO THIS EITHER (SORRY).
IN A WORLD WITH SO MANY “MOLDED&MANUFACTURED”
ARTISTS (DARE I USE
THE WORD
-ARTISTS-?) IT IS A
PLEASURE (OR TO SOME, A HINDRANCE) TO
INTRODUCE
AN ARTIST WHOSE
AIM IS FRIGHTFULLY TRUE
(simply CHElicious...
not just delicious)...
ladies and gentlemen............ Chelonis R. Jones.
Sounds Like:
CHEography : songs
chelonis r. jones "one & one", "blackout!"
(GPM 12") 2002
chelonis r. jones "I don't know?"
(GPM 12") 2002
chelonis r. jones "I don't know? remixes"
(GPM 12") 2003
chelonis r. jones "le bateau ivre"
(GPM 12") 2004
chelonis r. jones "deer in the headlights"
(GPM 12") 2005
chelonis r. jones "na na na" featured on
GPM label anniversary cd 2006
chelonis r. jones "dislocated genius"
(debut cd album) 2005
booka shade ft. chelonis r. jones "s.t.a.r.r.z."
(momento lp&12") 2004
booka shade ft. chelonis r. jones "stupid questions"
2004
röyksopp ft. chelonis r. jones "49%
(single/12"& cd: "the understanding") 2005
dj remo ft. chelonis r. jones "empire"
2005
dj remo ft. chelonis r. jones "black sabrina"
2005
dj remo ft. chelonis r. jones "black sabrina" -the remixes-"
2005
bioground ft. chelonis r. jones "complexity"
(cd: "love addiction")
2005
huntemann ft. chelonis r. jones "terminate the fire"
(12") 2005
belivers ft. chelonis r. jones "(you'll never change) the world"
(black mix 12") 2005
belivers ft. chelonis r. jones "(you'll never change) the world"
(white mix 12") 2005
huntemann ft. chelonis r. jones "scary love"
(12"prt.2&cd: "fieber") 2006
röyksopp ft. chelonis r. jones "go away"
(cds: "röyksopp's night out" &
"the understanding" lim. ed. cd) 2006
pinktronix ft. chelonis r. jones "baby boo"
(12"&cd "right on delay") 2006
pinktronix ft. chelonis r. jones "crash!"
(12"&cd "right on delay") 2006
franz & shape ft. chelonis r. jones "god lost my address"
(12" ep: destination / location&cd "acceleration") 2005
tennishero ft. chelonis r. jones "alone"
(12") 2006
dj remo ft. chelonis r. jones "sabrina says..."
(12") 2007
marc romboy vs. chelonis r. jones " helen cornell"
(12") 2007
chelonis r. jones "dirty lipstick" featured on
GPM 5th year label anniversary 2cd 2007
tocadisco ft. chelonis r. jones "shrine"
(soon to be released)
crackdown ft. chelonis r. jones "the wassily chair"
(soon to be released)
Brilliant corners: ----------
All hail the Dislocated Genius of
Chelonis R. Jones's electronic soul
San Francisco Bay Guardian, By Johnny Ray Huston
In the last year of the 20th century, Kodwo Eshun charted musical forms of Afrofuturism in the book More Brilliant than the Sun. Six years into the 21st century, I wonder what Eshun would think of Chelonis R. Jones.
"Camera! Lights! Action!" The words at the very beginning of Jones's debut Dislocated Genius herald an ambivalent performance. "I didn't want to burn it now, burn cork to dance and sing," he soon recites with lack of affect over a
marching beat. The detached attitude and robotic melody outdo Pete Shelley's "Homosapien." In the company of this lyric,
and Jones's cover painting for Dislocated Genius, the first utterance in the next song — "Life is hardly ever fair," probably
sung by New York–to–Europe voyager Jones, but treated to sound like a sample from an old record player — arrives with
vital irony.
The eight-minute track that follows, "Middle Finger Music," moves through menaced verses and curses over the type of automaton beat that Kraftwerk would factory stamp with approval before being overtaken by abstract daydreams and
nightmares. Crying gulls and King Tubby–like dub motifs flicker through the song's lonely, vast inner and outer space as
Jones near-whispers the titular words to himself, his voice multitracked into a self-harassing chorus. Here, and on the
gloomily humorous next song, "Vultures" (sample lines: "They circle-dive inside my dome ... They never leave my ass
alone"), paranoia pervades the atmosphere, which Jones renders like the imaginative painter he happens to be when he
isn't making music.
As a writer and singer, Jones possesses many voices, and if on "Middle Finger Music" he both listens to them and claims
they'll lead him to his doom, there and elsewhere on Dislocated Genius they yield extraordinary results. This recording's
avant-reaches have bewildered some club music writers who know of Jones strictly as the name behind a pair of sublime
and relatively straightforward — if poetic — soulful house-inflected singles, "I Don't Know" and "One and One." On those
tracks (as well as another mathematics-of-love number, "49 Percent," recorded with Röyksopp), Jones's voice trembles
and swoons like that of Off the Wall–era Michael Jackson — that is, when he isn't more freely vamping like a diva.
Describing a movie-ready tearful good-bye by train tracks, "I Don't Know”'s vocal outdoes some of the sensational male
testifying of early Chicago house: Jones laughs bitterly to himself and seems to cradle his own pain while reaching deep
into his chest for low notes as he feels a — that word again — "burn" in describing his crushed passion. He can also do
butch swagger — witness the quarrelsome and smart (rather than daft) punk of "L.A. Mattress."
Jones's talent is exciting because it reaches from pop melody to stranger realms; time and time again, the unique perspective of his songs dissolves into embattled technological chatter. The chorus of "The Hair" is as memorable as the
one to Wire's "I Am the Fly," and even more layered in its critique of a certain greed, and yet it's sung in a tone that's a
sly update on Smokey Robinson. In More Brilliant than the Sun, Eshun explored "Myth Science" through written or typed
words; Jones's "Mythologies (Myths I and II)" does so in sound, with skepticism — his voice is processed in a way that
brings the sweet but stinging theoretical distance of Scritti Politti's honeybee R&B to mind. A motif from "Mythologies"
returns in "Deer in the Headlights," further proving the formidable post-Baldwin, post-Basquiat methods within his
fractured madness.
By the end of Dislocated Genius, as "Debaser" forms an abstract contemporary take on the stripped-down funk of very
early Prince, Jones has made it clear that blackface is only the surface and the start of a defiant creative imagination just
as comfortable being mauve, olive green, or "ho-ish pink." In the final minutes of this extraordinary album, he's turned
Rimbaud's “The Drunken Boat” into a love song dedicated to someone who "defecate(s) words like Molly Bloom," and
managed to make the vocal melody float like a spectral ship on an ocean at night.
He may be a "laughingstock since the age of 13," but this self-described "gaudy cross of Streisand and Curtis Mayfield" is
still traveling. Where is he headed next? A place I'd like to hear. SFBG [email protected]
(used with the kind permission of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, sfbg.com )
Record Label: Get Physical Music (GPM), etc.
Type of Label: Indie
