Sex on Display

The electro orgasm of Peaches & Gonzales.



Best Seat in the House: Peaches rides the rail.

The sound of sex — hot breath, languorous moans, talking up the nasty — has always had a place in pop. From the provocation found in the lexicon of classic blues (fruit shaking, wiener warming) to the lick, suck, taste you patter of Janet Jackson’s new All For You, obviousness rules when it comes to getting dog-diggity in song. Yet spewed across lo-fi-electronics, honey-dripping becomes all the more vivid, a blue light special Kmart can’t advertise.

The scrawl of cheap technology — chintzy chugging old Rolands, barely beating Grooveboxes, moldy basslines — elevates smells, tastes and textures to oozier and groovier heights.

Take Can Oral a.k.a. Khan who released 12-inches on labels like Gizz TV before he signed to Matador. 1999s 1-900-GET-KHAN and his new No Comprendo are as audacious as they are lascivious. "We’re in the modern red light district" said Khan upon 1-900’s release.

Then there’s the way-blue Peaches & Gonzales, the red light district’s new best pals.

Not to be confused with Peaches & Herb, these Berlin-based Canadian expats have, in one swoop, created three vulgar, vexing works of scabrous lo-fi electro-sonics and bawdy talk: Peaches’ The Teaches Of Peaches, Chilly Gonzales’ The Entertainist and their joint EP Red Leather (all on the Kitty-Yo label).

With its campy B-52’s-esque chatter, damp-basement beat and horny robotic feel, Red Leather’s "Hot Pink Hot Sex" best details the duo’s musical Esperanto via Toronto — "backing up to the crack of your butt/ nipple on your biscotti, let’s get naughty you hottie/ the Jewish chick schtick, the tight fit/ are you lickin’ in or are you chicken shit?" And this is some of their subtler, funnier work.

"We like sex," say Peaches & Gonzales from Kitty-Yo’s Berlin offices about their kinky grooves. Gonzales continues, "The collaboration is great and fun and it’s what music should be about — to be able to work and not worry about the music but just have fun entertaining."

Together or alone, Peaches & Gonzales are on a quest to make sex dark but joyous: cool, forceful and magnificently insular, acknowledging little outside their circle jerk. When I mention that I hear bits of Kool Keith, Add N To X and Soulsonic Force in their sound, they’re clueless, admitting instead a shared love of Diamanda Galas and Pussy Galore. That’s saying something. For Peaches — a onetime folkie known as Merrill Nisker — songs like "Cum Undun," "Diddle My Skittle" and "Fuck the Pain Away" place her (and, by extension, all women) in the driver’s seat, toying with gender and empowerment as much as her haughty throbbing sound flirts with hip-hop. Despite her playful teasing, there is something savage at work within Peaches’ Teaches. Like watching in horror the gang bang in Last Exit to Brooklyn, a deep nauseating sensation looms over her prickly proceedings.

Former new wave guy Gonzales (his band Son was the alt-pop toast of Toronto) too toys with gender and role playing. His is overly macho material filled with fake funk and heady sentiments — an autobiographical braggadocio best heard on "The Worst MC Part 2" and "Futuristic Ain’t Shit To Me." Though Gonzales boasts and toasts, he also takes time to make fun of other macho hip-hoppers on "Candy" and "Cum on You."

There was no love lost when, separately, Peaches and Gonzales split the folk and new wave scenes respectively. "There was no scene," says Gonzales. "That was the problem. We were dissatisfied with our music. That’s when we met and together with [former collaborators] Moky and Sticky, we started The Shit, a sex-rock no-wave energy band. Then the scene of indie rockers came to us."

But even these friends bailed, leaving Peaches and Gonzales to their own devices. "All I wanted was to have a cheap easy subservient band," says Peaches, who with Gonzales formed Feedom — a repetitive, riff-driven electronic band where their sounds of squalor truly emanated. Each of their solo CDs — the sinister Entertainist, the ratty Teaches — has naughty bits produced or played on by the other.

Each disc is dirtball electronic music of the highest order — whether you’re sucked in by the seamy sexuality or whether you’re enthralled with the delectable grooves. Yet for exhibitionist/voyeuristic sake, little else in the currency of electronic dance packs the prurient potency of Red Leather. But getting them to admit to their own power, or to the demands of exhibitionistic/voyeuristic display, their testimony seems as silly as their sounds often do.

Offers Gonzales, "Do you keep your curtains open at night? We do!"

Adds Peaches, "I’m horny."

Peaches & Gonzales will open for Cibo Matto on Thu., May 3, 9 p.m., $16.50, at the TLA, 334 South St., 215-922-1011, www.electricfactory.com.