Coyote Clean Up is also known on the internet as Ice Cold Chrissy, a Detroit-dwelling bedroom producer who delivers strange and scattered sounds that are the perfect soundtrack to his bizarre internet persona. We've been following Chrissy since the Myspace days and now we are more than excited to stream his entire new album 2 HOT 2 WAIT, which comes out today on hot L.A. house label 100% Silk. 2 HOT will take you on a headphone adventure through all of the complex thoughts in his head while also leaving you thinking, "What the hell is this coyote's deal?" He told us about getting robbed in Detroit and Janet Jackson and plenty more stories, plus answers the age-old question "Who let the dogs out?".
Coyote Clean Up: I will try! This one summer I kept hearing on the news that coyotes were "invading" suburban and urban areas… and some people were up in arms because a coyote ate someone's baby poodle or something. They media was acting as if the coyote's were the invasive species, and not the pink manicured poodle, so they start removing and killing some of the coyotes. I thought this was ridiculous but nobody seemed to agree with me or care. There's big packs of wild dogs in Detroit and when I was really bored (I didn't have a car) I used to chase them around. I swear I saw a few coyotes or mixes. It's interesting, unlike wolves, coyotes thrive in human populated areas. I saw some pictures of a coyote who got onto the light rail in Portland and took a seat on the train and took a ride. One walked into a store in Chicago and laid down in the beverage cooler to cool off… like no big deal. Then one night I was walking to my temporary art studio and I saw a coyote in the middle of the street. It was huge! It looked right at me and freaked out and started running away. It's claws were huge and you could hear them scrape against the pavement. I have no idea why, but I started chasing. I think I wanted to catch it and make it my friend.A German artist named Joseph Beuys did an art performance piece in 1974 called "I Like America and America Likes Me" where he flew into the USA and spent 3 days stuck in an art gallery with a coyote. It was messy but at the end of the 3 days the coyote grew comfortable with him, he hugged it, left, and flew back to Germany. His quote on the piece was, 'I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote.' I once read an article about the piece entitled "Art Shows We'd Hate To Clean Up After." Haha. It's all a bit pretentious, but I think I find some real humor in it. There's a fun and fine line between pretentiousness and humor. A lot of people don't get it… but that's part of the fun.Right before I started the project there was also this song by the Die Monitr Batss…called "Clean Up" I couldn't get it out of my head and still can't, especially when I have to clean my room or something. it's a groovy noisy no-wave kind of song with monotone female vocals repeating "Are you the one who cleaned it up?/I'm not the one who cleaned it up/No, no, no./The mess we made in bed today/Can't explain/A victim of the night I spent with you." (I think.)When I started to the project I took this all in light humor, I didn't think Coyote Clean Up would go anywhere or anyone would notice me. It felt like a last ditch effort to be honest. All these elements sort of fell into place and Coyote Clean Up was the name of the game.Who is Ice Cold Chrissy then?
That's me! Frozen solid. Before Coyote Clean Up I didn't have a defined musical project for a minute. I was making some folky-dub-electronic tracks and I didn't know what name to give em. A few close friends always called me Chrissy. I found it endearing. I had made some hip-hop beats and a friend of mine was going to rap on them so I wanted to throw in an introduction and somehow "Ice Cold Chrissy" popped into my head. "Yo! This is Ice Cold Chrissy and you're listening too… blah blah blah." You know, like old school NYC hip-hop style. Quickly after that I started DJing a lot and that's what people started calling me. It's been my DJ name for a while now.Have you lived anywhere besides Detroit?
I was born in Cleveland but moved to Detroit with my family in 1989. In 2000-2001 I moved to Chicago for year to study art at the Art Institute of Chicago. I didn't graduate high school, but got into it anyways, so I was pretty stoked. I have always been heavy into the Chicago experimental scene (Tortoise, Bundy K Brown, Rob Mazurek, Etc.) so it was a real cool time to be there. I learned a lot about music and got tons of records I still spin today. It was also the first time I DJed a real party. That's where I had my first art piece in an art show and it was actual a sound piece. I went broke real quick and came crawling back to Detroit where I could live with friends for dirt cheap.In 2005-2006 I moved to Seattle for a short period of time. I was having a rough time in Detroit and my buddy, Peterson, the love of my life, called me and was said "You sound miserable, move to Seattle, you can sleep on my floor." I loved it there. The water, the forests, the mountains. The insane library. I ride BMX and skateboard and there's tons of ridiculous skateparks out there. Some friends of mine ride very serious BMX and build huge dirt jumps in the woods. We'd go out to the woods and they'd be jumping 30 foot gaps flying through the forest. Hannah from The Gossip lived down the street from me and I would bump into her all the time and I found her inspiring. Adam from the Chromatics also lived down the street from me and I'd run into him. I wanted to play drums in the Chromatics. I think it was about to go down but then Adam split town down to Portland. I was so bummed! Ha. Imagine how well dressed I would be now?You mentioned playing sketchy after hours in Detroit. What is one of the weirdest things that has ever happened at one of those?
Well all the rumors of Detroit's grit, grime, and crime are unfortunately true. My friends used to throw raves in the 90's and they were so sketchy - they freaked me out to be honest. I'd go hide in the chill out room. The whole warehouse rave scene got shut down by some new laws and special force of crooked cops organized to bust raves, but there's still interesting parties going on. It seems like at least half of the good parties in Detroit are illegal in some way or another.The weirdest thing that ever happened to me was… a year and half ago. I was leaving a party about to close my car door when three thugs snuck out from behind a van in the dark and grabbed the door handle of my car. One of them put a gun to my head and pushed me into the passenger seat and they all got in the car and locked the doors. The dude in the driver's seat passed the gun to the guy in the back who put it against the back of my head while they very haphazardly robbed me. I kinda threw most everything that was in my hands and pockets onto the floor of my car in shock when they jumped in the car so I couldn't find anything. I was like, "Dude, if you take the gun off the back of my head I'll give you everything I got!" Somehow my car key got separated from house keys and fell on the floor and they couldn't find it. They were so dumb. They ended up stealing $60, my expired library card, and my house keys which they would never find. While one guy had the gun to the back of my head another guy punched me straight in the face and broke my nose. I mean, c'mon! Punched in the face while there's a gun to the back of my head? Is that really necessary? I'll tell you what, that's the worst feeling on the planet. A car pulled up that could've looked like a cop car and they got spooked and took off. I was just like… this is pathetic.Who was the first person you ever saw perform that made you want to start making music?
I think the first concert I went to was Janet Jackson during the Janet. tour in 1993. I had already been into late 80's and early 90's hip-hop and R&B. My mom bought me a Yo! MTV Raps tape cassette in 89. The first record I bought was the Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" 7". I was 5 or 6. I'd watch MTV and with my parents and listen to the radio like crazy. When I saw Janet, I couldn't believe how fun it looked. Dancing around on stage singing awesome songs for money? Amazing. I wanted to be like BVD or Tony! Toni! Toné! but there was no way I could pull that off. Then in 1997, I think it was, I saw Mouse On Mars open for Stereolab on Stereolab's Dots and Loops tour. Mouse On Mars were just having so much simple fun on stage, playing the coolest…out-there … dance music. I was like… dang… I could do that!How did you wind up getting started?
I first starting making my own tracks in the mid 90's when I stole my brother's bass guitar. I'd record things to tape and work with weird samples and over dubs. I started playing in some post-punk kind of bands with my friends and continued working on recordings myself. I was always in choir class in school so I started singing in the bands. Into the late 90's I started getting better using a 4 Track Recorder and it snowballed from there. I had been collecting records the whole time too, obviously.What actually gets you on the floor and dancing? and when was the last time you actually danced all night?
I danced for most of the night on Wednesday night. Enough to wake up sore. I saw my buddy's dark shoegazy band Oblisk and then went and saw Pearson Sound… who absolutely kills it. I don't go out every night, but Detroit's got such a good vibe when it comes to the dance floor. When I do go out it's a blast. I'm a dancer. I love dancing. I'll admit it. I dance in my bedroom, I dance by myself, wherever. What gets me on the floor is just a good vibe, good selection, and a real groove. No faking of the funk. Detroit's the best for that. People DANCE in Detroit. There might be a super small crowd, but when you got someone like Moodymann and Rick Wilhite on the decks, and everyone's there for the same reason, you hit the floor!What do you use to make music?
I've carried over all my techniques I've developed in the 90's and just use them in new various ways with technology. Janky keyboards, real drums, bass guitar, guitar, soft synths, samples of old recordings of mine, my voice, all cut up and programmed. You might not realize it, but there's lots of acoustic guitar on Coyote Clean Up tracks. Sometimes I will still record things to tape cassette, but I mainly record digital and compose things digitally. I still have a small group of friends that I've been jamming with forever. (I hate the word jamming, but think about it in terms of Bob Marley "Jamming"… reggae-dub style).I started composing songs digitally in 2000 on the original iMac G3. The big ones. I still have it. I also have an Apple IIGS. There were artists such as Markus Popp and Mark Fell who I greatly admire and were making and performing music on laptops and computers as early as the late 90's. They weren't criticized for using computers or laptops to make music back then… it was often seen as "serious" music. The whole laptop DJ thing in the mid naughts and Serato really ruined the context, content, and ideas behind computer music.. if you ask me. People started looking at making music and playing music in conjunction with technology all wrong. You got people like Theo Parrish screaming his head off every chance he gets. I've seen just as many terrible bands with guitars as I have artists with laptops. Don't get me wrong, I love all vinyl DJ sets and I spin them often. However, I definitely enjoy making and playing music on a computer. In the early 2000's this was the technology I dreamt of and now it's here.The other day my 5 year old niece said to me, "let's go up to your room and dance to computer music! Let's make a song!" I love that. On the flip side, she also loves going threw my records and picking on to play. Usually she picks the one's with pink sleeves. The last one she dropped was MGUN's record on Don't Be Afraid which freaked her out. "This is WAY too funky," she said.What else do you do beside's make music?
I like long walks on dark beaches where you can't really tell where the water meets the sand and you accidentally fall into the ocean. I'm also a visual artist across most mediums except ceramics. Haha. I work on a lot of abstract paintings, drawings, and illustrations. I was focusing on this a quite seriously before Coyote Clean Up took off. It still plays a large roll in my life and I like to look at music and all other art forms under the same umbrella. They feed off each other in so many interesting ways and create such a colorful world you can run and hide into.I also try to spend a lot of time outdoors. The great thing about Detroit is that 20 minutes away from the city (most everyone has a car out here and is very used to driving long distances) you can be in a seemingly wilderness area. Keeping that balance between urban ideas and totally natural ones is what keeps me level headed. I absolutely love listening to music on headphones that might be designed strictly for "club use" while riding a bike deep into the woods or running around an isolate lake. It puts things into a whole new context and you hear things differently. A dark heavy house track might just freak me out in a dirty warehouse in the city where the cops are about the raid the place…. but when you're listening to it overlooking a lake in the woods with a thunderstorm approaching, it can have a completely different and amazing feel. Those juxtapositions, contradictions, dualities, and opposing elements fuel my work greatly. I think everyone needs a little more nature in their life. Sometimes you gotta just stop… slow down… and slip and fall into the swamp. The swamp of life.
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THUMP:Please explain the name Coyote Clean Up
Coyote Clean Up: I will try! This one summer I kept hearing on the news that coyotes were "invading" suburban and urban areas… and some people were up in arms because a coyote ate someone's baby poodle or something. They media was acting as if the coyote's were the invasive species, and not the pink manicured poodle, so they start removing and killing some of the coyotes. I thought this was ridiculous but nobody seemed to agree with me or care. There's big packs of wild dogs in Detroit and when I was really bored (I didn't have a car) I used to chase them around. I swear I saw a few coyotes or mixes. It's interesting, unlike wolves, coyotes thrive in human populated areas. I saw some pictures of a coyote who got onto the light rail in Portland and took a seat on the train and took a ride. One walked into a store in Chicago and laid down in the beverage cooler to cool off… like no big deal. Then one night I was walking to my temporary art studio and I saw a coyote in the middle of the street. It was huge! It looked right at me and freaked out and started running away. It's claws were huge and you could hear them scrape against the pavement. I have no idea why, but I started chasing. I think I wanted to catch it and make it my friend.A German artist named Joseph Beuys did an art performance piece in 1974 called "I Like America and America Likes Me" where he flew into the USA and spent 3 days stuck in an art gallery with a coyote. It was messy but at the end of the 3 days the coyote grew comfortable with him, he hugged it, left, and flew back to Germany. His quote on the piece was, 'I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote.' I once read an article about the piece entitled "Art Shows We'd Hate To Clean Up After." Haha. It's all a bit pretentious, but I think I find some real humor in it. There's a fun and fine line between pretentiousness and humor. A lot of people don't get it… but that's part of the fun.
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That's me! Frozen solid. Before Coyote Clean Up I didn't have a defined musical project for a minute. I was making some folky-dub-electronic tracks and I didn't know what name to give em. A few close friends always called me Chrissy. I found it endearing. I had made some hip-hop beats and a friend of mine was going to rap on them so I wanted to throw in an introduction and somehow "Ice Cold Chrissy" popped into my head. "Yo! This is Ice Cold Chrissy and you're listening too… blah blah blah." You know, like old school NYC hip-hop style. Quickly after that I started DJing a lot and that's what people started calling me. It's been my DJ name for a while now.
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I was born in Cleveland but moved to Detroit with my family in 1989. In 2000-2001 I moved to Chicago for year to study art at the Art Institute of Chicago. I didn't graduate high school, but got into it anyways, so I was pretty stoked. I have always been heavy into the Chicago experimental scene (Tortoise, Bundy K Brown, Rob Mazurek, Etc.) so it was a real cool time to be there. I learned a lot about music and got tons of records I still spin today. It was also the first time I DJed a real party. That's where I had my first art piece in an art show and it was actual a sound piece. I went broke real quick and came crawling back to Detroit where I could live with friends for dirt cheap.In 2005-2006 I moved to Seattle for a short period of time. I was having a rough time in Detroit and my buddy, Peterson, the love of my life, called me and was said "You sound miserable, move to Seattle, you can sleep on my floor." I loved it there. The water, the forests, the mountains. The insane library. I ride BMX and skateboard and there's tons of ridiculous skateparks out there. Some friends of mine ride very serious BMX and build huge dirt jumps in the woods. We'd go out to the woods and they'd be jumping 30 foot gaps flying through the forest. Hannah from The Gossip lived down the street from me and I would bump into her all the time and I found her inspiring. Adam from the Chromatics also lived down the street from me and I'd run into him. I wanted to play drums in the Chromatics. I think it was about to go down but then Adam split town down to Portland. I was so bummed! Ha. Imagine how well dressed I would be now?
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Well all the rumors of Detroit's grit, grime, and crime are unfortunately true. My friends used to throw raves in the 90's and they were so sketchy - they freaked me out to be honest. I'd go hide in the chill out room. The whole warehouse rave scene got shut down by some new laws and special force of crooked cops organized to bust raves, but there's still interesting parties going on. It seems like at least half of the good parties in Detroit are illegal in some way or another.The weirdest thing that ever happened to me was… a year and half ago. I was leaving a party about to close my car door when three thugs snuck out from behind a van in the dark and grabbed the door handle of my car. One of them put a gun to my head and pushed me into the passenger seat and they all got in the car and locked the doors. The dude in the driver's seat passed the gun to the guy in the back who put it against the back of my head while they very haphazardly robbed me. I kinda threw most everything that was in my hands and pockets onto the floor of my car in shock when they jumped in the car so I couldn't find anything. I was like, "Dude, if you take the gun off the back of my head I'll give you everything I got!" Somehow my car key got separated from house keys and fell on the floor and they couldn't find it. They were so dumb. They ended up stealing $60, my expired library card, and my house keys which they would never find. While one guy had the gun to the back of my head another guy punched me straight in the face and broke my nose. I mean, c'mon! Punched in the face while there's a gun to the back of my head? Is that really necessary? I'll tell you what, that's the worst feeling on the planet. A car pulled up that could've looked like a cop car and they got spooked and took off. I was just like… this is pathetic.
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I think the first concert I went to was Janet Jackson during the Janet. tour in 1993. I had already been into late 80's and early 90's hip-hop and R&B. My mom bought me a Yo! MTV Raps tape cassette in 89. The first record I bought was the Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" 7". I was 5 or 6. I'd watch MTV and with my parents and listen to the radio like crazy. When I saw Janet, I couldn't believe how fun it looked. Dancing around on stage singing awesome songs for money? Amazing. I wanted to be like BVD or Tony! Toni! Toné! but there was no way I could pull that off. Then in 1997, I think it was, I saw Mouse On Mars open for Stereolab on Stereolab's Dots and Loops tour. Mouse On Mars were just having so much simple fun on stage, playing the coolest…out-there … dance music. I was like… dang… I could do that!How did you wind up getting started?
I first starting making my own tracks in the mid 90's when I stole my brother's bass guitar. I'd record things to tape and work with weird samples and over dubs. I started playing in some post-punk kind of bands with my friends and continued working on recordings myself. I was always in choir class in school so I started singing in the bands. Into the late 90's I started getting better using a 4 Track Recorder and it snowballed from there. I had been collecting records the whole time too, obviously.
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I danced for most of the night on Wednesday night. Enough to wake up sore. I saw my buddy's dark shoegazy band Oblisk and then went and saw Pearson Sound… who absolutely kills it. I don't go out every night, but Detroit's got such a good vibe when it comes to the dance floor. When I do go out it's a blast. I'm a dancer. I love dancing. I'll admit it. I dance in my bedroom, I dance by myself, wherever. What gets me on the floor is just a good vibe, good selection, and a real groove. No faking of the funk. Detroit's the best for that. People DANCE in Detroit. There might be a super small crowd, but when you got someone like Moodymann and Rick Wilhite on the decks, and everyone's there for the same reason, you hit the floor!What do you use to make music?
I've carried over all my techniques I've developed in the 90's and just use them in new various ways with technology. Janky keyboards, real drums, bass guitar, guitar, soft synths, samples of old recordings of mine, my voice, all cut up and programmed. You might not realize it, but there's lots of acoustic guitar on Coyote Clean Up tracks. Sometimes I will still record things to tape cassette, but I mainly record digital and compose things digitally. I still have a small group of friends that I've been jamming with forever. (I hate the word jamming, but think about it in terms of Bob Marley "Jamming"… reggae-dub style).I started composing songs digitally in 2000 on the original iMac G3. The big ones. I still have it. I also have an Apple IIGS. There were artists such as Markus Popp and Mark Fell who I greatly admire and were making and performing music on laptops and computers as early as the late 90's. They weren't criticized for using computers or laptops to make music back then… it was often seen as "serious" music. The whole laptop DJ thing in the mid naughts and Serato really ruined the context, content, and ideas behind computer music.. if you ask me. People started looking at making music and playing music in conjunction with technology all wrong. You got people like Theo Parrish screaming his head off every chance he gets. I've seen just as many terrible bands with guitars as I have artists with laptops. Don't get me wrong, I love all vinyl DJ sets and I spin them often. However, I definitely enjoy making and playing music on a computer. In the early 2000's this was the technology I dreamt of and now it's here.The other day my 5 year old niece said to me, "let's go up to your room and dance to computer music! Let's make a song!" I love that. On the flip side, she also loves going threw my records and picking on to play. Usually she picks the one's with pink sleeves. The last one she dropped was MGUN's record on Don't Be Afraid which freaked her out. "This is WAY too funky," she said.What else do you do beside's make music?
I like long walks on dark beaches where you can't really tell where the water meets the sand and you accidentally fall into the ocean. I'm also a visual artist across most mediums except ceramics. Haha. I work on a lot of abstract paintings, drawings, and illustrations. I was focusing on this a quite seriously before Coyote Clean Up took off. It still plays a large roll in my life and I like to look at music and all other art forms under the same umbrella. They feed off each other in so many interesting ways and create such a colorful world you can run and hide into.I also try to spend a lot of time outdoors. The great thing about Detroit is that 20 minutes away from the city (most everyone has a car out here and is very used to driving long distances) you can be in a seemingly wilderness area. Keeping that balance between urban ideas and totally natural ones is what keeps me level headed. I absolutely love listening to music on headphones that might be designed strictly for "club use" while riding a bike deep into the woods or running around an isolate lake. It puts things into a whole new context and you hear things differently. A dark heavy house track might just freak me out in a dirty warehouse in the city where the cops are about the raid the place…. but when you're listening to it overlooking a lake in the woods with a thunderstorm approaching, it can have a completely different and amazing feel. Those juxtapositions, contradictions, dualities, and opposing elements fuel my work greatly. I think everyone needs a little more nature in their life. Sometimes you gotta just stop… slow down… and slip and fall into the swamp. The swamp of life.