Chris Corner, formerly of the Sneaker Pimps, now records as a solo artist under the pseudonym IAMX, turning out lyrically terse, melodically effortless tunes that are piercingly emotive. It is effusively 80s art-house electro with a warmer, less clinical sound than that term normally denotes.
His appearances on The Mighty Boosh and the fact that Noel Fielding has been known to play bass in IAMX might lend him, for some, a kind of underhand, ironic credibility, but the truth is that with Corner he and his music are so compelling he doesn’t need his friends to get him any attention.
Now living in Berlin, a city he sees as vital for his music, he hasn’t always had such a good relationship with the places where he’s lived: “ [In London] there is so much input constantly, you don’t really have time to enjoy your life or get on top of your creativity or your work because your always creating for a different reason rather than for the purity of creating.” Clearly sensitive to the psychology surrounding the process of making music, he admits semi-reluctantly that, “obviously, people that call themselves an artist are doing it for some kind of therapy.” This conception of the artist is perhaps particularly apt for Corner.
The artistic universe that IAMX conjures up can seem to be one where sex and sexuality (the main forces at play in his universe) are confrontational, sometimes brutal. Is that a reasonable analysis? “Yes, I think. The world of IAMX is an extension, or an extreme extension of my personality, which I don’t live day to day. It gives me an opportunity to get that stuff out, of course, on stage and in the lyrics. I have opinions, maybe not opinions, more just fleeting love affairs with these ideas. With experiences that I’ve had with sexuality and drugs and whatever, it’s not only a fight with observing the world, it’s a fight with myself. But it doesn’t consume me in an obsessive manner. It kind of consumes me when I make records, but day to day existence is a little calmer.”
Corner’s notorious stage persona is uncompromising and it has also been said to ‘consume’ him. He calls touring an addiction: “You have this feeling of dread and anxiety about it but there’s such liberation and freedom and power within touring, the reward that outweighs the anxiety.” He has in fact compared performing on stage to having sex with 500 people and the only correction of that assessment he offers me is that the number of participants is now up to more like 1,000. “I still feel that it’s on a level with the sexual. There is something completely animal and visceral about the whole thing. In my own experience, because of the nature of IAMX, it allows it to be like that, it feels right, and it feels like a great place to completely go, like you would when you’re fucking.”
True to a face-off between aggressive confrontation and visceral liberation, while IAMX sometimes gives a pessimistic vision of the possibility of human relationships working out, some of Corner’s best songs such as ‘Spit it Out’ seem to offer the instinctual as a positive way to get through our human interactions: “I think it’s the only thing I know. For me, that sort of instinctual way of living is a real antidote for my… not upbringing, but for my scientific, solution-finding brain.
“And the instinctive, more feeling, more emotional way of living is something that I really aspire to, that I’m still looking for and I’m still fighting to get. It’s not that I want it to completely take over and be a barbarian or something but there’s something really attractive about it. I know that it’s there in me and it comes out when I’m writing and it comes out on stage, but I don’t live that every day. And what I’m seeing in that is that I can only hope that it can exist within the realms of a relationship. I have fleeting moments of it; I can smell it, but it’s still not quite in my grasp.”
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