Composer, pianist, and one-of-a-kind entertainer — the brilliant musician Chilly Gonzales releases his long-awaited new album, Gonzo!
Across three Solo Piano albums, chamber music, collaborative records with Boys Noize, Jarvis Cocker and Plastikman, and even a Christmas album, Chilly Gonzales has spent twelve years putting out instrumental music — and building up plenty he needed to get off his chest.
His words, dormant and unreleased since the 2011 orchestral rap work The Unspeakable Chilly Gonzales, began to heat up again in early 2022, when he brought a long decade of psychoanalysis to a close. Behind the wordplay and name-dropping (Ron Jeremy, Marie Kondo, Genghis Khan, Philip Glass and more) lies an ongoing tension between persuasion and confession, delusion and self-awareness, and gratitude.
The tension between creativity and commerce has been a lifelong inquiry for Chilly Gonzales. But is this really a rap album? Instrumental pieces like the Stravinsky-esque "Fidelio" and the tear-jerking "Eau de Cologne" let his words settle into the ear while reminding listeners of the Chilly Gonzales persona: the musical genius. Can the artist be separated from the art?
At sixteen, Chilly Gonzales was dragged by his father to see a Wagner opera in Bayreuth, Germany. The young teenager was overwhelmed by the music, yet understood that its composer was a monstrous human being. Out of that conundrum came "F*ck Wagner" (M8), a song you might say is about Kanye West, cancel culture, and the tragic humanity of every artist. That separation demands the freedom to praise Wagner's (or Kanye's) music while still saying "fuck Wagner."
And so, in his adopted hometown of Cologne, Chilly Gonzales is spearheading a campaign to strip Wagner's name from Richard-Wagner-Strasse and replace it with that of Tina Turner, who — like Chilly Gonzales himself in 2012 — chose to make Cologne her home as a foreigner.
"Open the Kimono" (M5) is a tech-industry phrase meaning "transparency," repurposed here to describe the artist's work. As Chilly Gonzales puts it, a true artist has no choice but to expose himself. Detroit OG Bruiser Wolf (signed to Danny Brown's Bruiser Brigade) is the album's sole featured vocalist.
The record reaches its boiling point on "Neoclassical Massacre," a verse-form tirade against artists who make music to fit Spotify playlist culture — conflicted feelings from the man who, with 2004's classic Solo Piano, unintentionally invented the "neoclassical" style himself. There are no easy answers, and the truth hurts.