I saw Cooling Prongs -the duo of Christopher Fleeger and Sharon Udoh- on September 16th at Gretchen in Berlin, where they opened for clipping. Up until that moment, I recognized the name Cooling Prongs as a frequent collaborator of clipping., yet I had no idea what I was about to witness on stage. By the time their set ended, their performance had completely shaken me to my core. I remember thinking, “I wonder if people who saw Einstürzende Neubauten for the first time in the 1980s felt something similar to what I’m feeling right now?”
Not long after, I slipped into Fleeger’s DMs and suggested doing an interview over email, who kindly agreed, and what came out of it is the rather fun transcript you’re about to read below.
First of all, how did this crazy project come about? And was the sound you were going for this crazy in your mind when you initially formed?
Christopher Fleeger: I have a constant field recording practice, but I wanted to take a shot at performing songs in a way that captured the same rush I felt the first time I heard Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back when I was nine years old. That record was a tension of chaos and precise control, and I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since. With Cooling Prongs, I’m essentially working in a similar spirit to the Bomb Squad, but instead of digging through crates, I’m building my orchestra out of field recordings and objects I’ve recorded. So even though all the sounds are things most people have probably heard before, the way they’re arranged feels really personal to me. That’s what might make it sound kind of new, or even a little unhinged.
How did Counterfeit Madison a.k.a. Sharon Udoh join?
I first saw Sharon Udoh in a play, -Jonathan Snipes from clipping. was doing the sound design- and I was blown away by her voice, her improvisational instincts and the way she commanded emotion in the moment. I slid into her DMs through the years since then, probably too much, telling her she was in my dream band. Eventually, we agreed to meet in Los Angeles, rehearse, perform, and now she’s in my dream band.
You open your concerts with the video of a man tearing down a computer, which me and the Berlin crowd found absolutely hilarious. Do you know the two people in the video, or is it just something that you encountered randomly on the Internet?
That’s Ice-T and his wife Coco. The video’s from his suburban home by the trash bins. He’s trying to destroy the hard drive in his MacBook so no one steals his intellectual property. Ironically, I’ve probably stolen half the ideas from that video myself. I grew up on late ’80s and early ’90s rap, and Ice-T was a central figure to me.
My brother showed me the clip, and I was struck when Ice-T, in his signature cadence, pulls out the MacBook’s cooling fan and announces, ‘Cooling Prongs!’ To my ears, those words had never appeared together before. I couldn’t find anyone else saying it online, so naturally, it became the band name. And it makes sense: our music is full of abrasive, prongy energy, but also has some cooling, soothing calm. It’s rough and tender at the same time. Ice-T basically named my band for me. Thanks, Ice-T.
Walk us through the technical setup you use in live performances. What do those include?
I play a two-octave marimba controller with mallets, but it’s not just a keyboard: It’s covered in ribbon controllers I can touch to scrub through samples, play chords, or execute custom commands within my Max/MSP patch. The mallets themselves are conduits and have coiled magnets, so a lot of the sound responds to my proximity just by hovering, kind of like a theremin. Rather than push “start” on a drum machine, I am the clock. I strike the root notes to pilot sequences, triggering thousands of tiny samples with tails, walking through round-robin fragments of my songs “live” like a way-too-complicated video game.
Among your recorded and released tracks so far, are there two tracks that come to mind, one the easiest and one hardest to create?
The easiest track was “Overture” on 316. Since the physical release was initially on cassette, I wanted it to sound like a dying cassette motor; the tape was being eaten. I just borrowed themes from the other songs and made an introduction, a suite you might hear in a musical, then put it at the end of the album, because the tracklist is backwards.
“Midnight”, however, was a long-suffering piece. I mounted mics on the roof rack of my Japanese domestic import campervan and monitored from the inside for days and days, sleeping there -hundreds of hours of material.
I did an all-field-recording (+Daveed Diggs saying ‘MIDNIGHT!’) cover of Ice-T’s “Midnight” for a split with clipping. on Sub Pop. It’s a speeding-from-the-cops map song of South Central, so every time Ice-T raps an intersection “-We boned down Vernon, right on Normandie, left on Florence”- you hear a field recording of that location.
One of my stops was right by a Popeyes, and the smell of those dirty, greasy, spicy fries was way more appealing than the lentils I was cooking inside the van. So I kept the mics rolling and went inside to indulge. While in line, directly in front of me, someone pulled out a gun, cocked and loaded. Not pointing at the counter, but at the person in front of them! They ran outside, shots fired. That’s exactly where the gunshot sounds in the piece come from. The rest of us fast-food customers didn’t really know how to process it. So I guess we just picked up our food. I never saw the two people or the gun again when I finally returned to my van.
I would say your live performance is somewhere between music and theatrics, with some humor elements. What are your favorite bands that put forward an unconventional approach in their live shows?
I aim to reach the audience between the bursts of sound, but the music carries me like a current. Often my words come out too fast, fractured, and the connection I’m seeking wavers in the wake of the momentum.
Bands: Cardiacs, BBBBBBB, They Might Be Giants, Fishbone, Previous Industries (Open Mike Eagle, STILL RIFT, and Video Dave), Captain Ahab, The Party System, DAT Politics, Sparks, Melt-Banana, clipping.
You have a long-standing friendship with clipping, as well as professional collaborations. What can you say about your relationship?
My besties… I’m really glad to have been around them since the beginning, because they make music the way I like to make music. We finish each other’s sequences. Other bands might talk guitars, but we get to talk about sounds we’ve found in the woods or on a cargo ship. I get to make clipping. beats by loading up my van with a PA and driving it past microphones, recording electroreception from a fish in the Amazon, launching OctaMED on a Commodore Amiga 500, or even burning a piano with microphones inside of it.
What future plans do Cooling Prongs have?
New album, hopefully more Sharon Udoh and maybe I’ll finally learn how to sing and play.
Let’s imagine we are 100 years into the future in a Musicians Theme Park, where every artist or musician involved gets their own memorial stone with a specific lyric by them written on it. What lyric would you like to see on Cooling Prongs?
“If we traded seats, would I feel your heat?”
You can check out Cooling Prongs’ Bandcamp profile here.
