Ssion, a DIY Hero of the Technicolor Underground, Returns Refreshed

NEW YORK — The first time musician and artist Cody Critcheloe came to New York, in 2001 when he was 19, his trip turned into a pilgrimage. “I walked around the city trying to find the place where the Mudd Club and Danceteria used to be,” he said. “When I found them, I just stood there, staring ridiculously up at these buildings saying, ‘cool’ — as if they were still there.”

A few weeks ago, Critcheloe made a fresh journey to the city’s nocturnal past by visiting the Museum of Modern Art to see its Club 57 exhibition, which valorizes one of the most creative spaces for music, art and mischief of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Entering an immersive room dedicated to the throbbing Day-Glo work of Kenny Scharf, it was hard to tell where Critcheloe’s body ended and the art began. His outfit of the day, highlighted by Bazooka-pink tracksuit pants and a carrot-orange jacket, bled seamlessly into Sharf’s tsunami of color-saturated chairs, bottles and toys. “Everything is so bright, and there’s so much of it,” Critcheloe marveled.

The same could be said of his own creations. Operating under the stage name Ssion (pronounced Shun), Critcheloe, 37, has amassed a rich body of work that sprawls over several disciplines — music, video direction and painting — all infused with a whimsically dense array of pop culture references. Each is fired by the spirit of queercore, a 30-year-old music and art movement that draws on the outsider perspective of the LGBT experience to both reclaim and redefine the early fury and independence of punk.

After finally moving to New York in 2010, Critcheloe became part of his own loose, modern club scene at spaces like Secret Project Robot and GHE20GOTH1K (pronounced Ghetto Gothic), along with other young creatives, like the rapper/performance artist Mykki Blanco, the designer Shayne Oliver and the musician Nick Weiss. “Queercore runs deeply through my work, and it forever will,” Critcheloe said. “It allowed me to be into anything. I can be into Kylie Minogue, and it’s punk because I say it’s punk.”

Critcheloe’s latest project pushes that principle to its limit. After concentrating for the last half decade on directing videos for other artists, including Santigold, Grizzly Bear and Minogue, he is releasing “O,” his third full album and his first in seven years, in early May. It’s by far his most ambitious work, making either sonic, or visual, allusion to everything from expected gay pop touchstones (George Michael, Prince, Liza Minnelli) to ones far afield (Pink Floyd, Sonic Youth, Jimi Hendrix). The sensibility and sound is at once dance-pop and classic rock, art and trash, all spun around the breathy vocals of Critcheloe, which can paint him as the lost love child of Prince and the Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant.

Critcheloe has billed “O” as an “audiovisual” album, à la Beyoncé's last two releases. But operating on a tight DIY budget means every song may not get its own video. Even so, the two he has released $1 million worth of ideas. The first, “Comeback,” which lasts more than seven minutes, amounts to what Critcheloe called “my modest attempt at ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.'” It links three distinct musical segments, matched to scenes that draw on influences that range from the Bob Fosse film “All That Jazz” to the surreal cow cover of Pink Floyd’s 1970 album, “Atom Heart Mother.” In the video, Critcheloe has the cow’s rear painted on his face, “where it belongs,” he said.

His follow-up video, “At Least the Sky Is Blue,” dolls him up as Minnelli, while guest star Ariel Pink appears as Elizabeth Taylor in a wheelchair. During the song, the two croon Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” from “Rust Never Sleeps.” “Rock is not funny these days,” Critcheloe said. “I wanted to bring that back.”

His rock side came out more strongly this time, in part, because of the input of one producer on the album, Sam Mehran of the band Test Icicles. (The album’s other producer, Weiss of the band Teengirl Fantasy, helped retain the electro-funk style from earlier Ssion songs.) “Cody wanted a wider palate of sounds this time,” Mehran said. “This album used a whole matrix of ideas, some of them drawn from the music Cody grew up listening to.”

“I wouldn’t exist as a musician if it weren’t for punk rock,” Critcheloe said. It helps that his mother is what he calls “a real hard-core rocker chick.” She was a draftsman, drawing pipelines for Texas Gas, while his father worked as a maintenance man at a paper mill near the tiny town of Lewisport, Kentucky, where Critcheloe grew up. “It’s all tobacco farmers, so you could smoke at 15 if your parents signed a release,” he said. “Mine did.”

In middle school, he was bullied, but he excelled at painting, which gave him a voice — one he often used to provoke. During “Spirit Week,” his class was assigned to create banners to represent the ‘80s. “Mine said ‘AIDS’ — in blood red,” Critcheloe said. “Even the teachers didn’t know how to tame me.”

After he got a driver’s license, he traveled far enough to find a group of kindred spirit punk girls who introduced him to the films of Gregg Araki and Pedro Almodóvar. At 17, he formed his first band with them, choosing a name pronounced Shun to embrace, and redefine, rejection and shame. He thought the spelling of Ssion “looked so chic,” though he now regrets that no one can spell or pronounce it. He modeled Ssion’s initial style on Lydia Lunch’s no wave attack band, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. “Our whole thing was trying to get kicked offstage,” he said. “We got good at that.”

Critcheloe really blossomed when he entered the Kansas City Art Institute, located in a city he loves. He first came east after winning a one-year scholarship to the New York Studio Residency Program, which let him do whatever kind of art he wanted. He spent more of his time at rock clubs, which were then experiencing a resurgence with emerging bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Strokes. After a show by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the small club formerly known as Brownies, he gave the group’s singer, Karen O, copies of the stop-motion animation pieces he’d been working on. Impressed, she not only invited him to design the cover of the band’s first album, “Fever to Tell,” but to create the art for all its early singles and posters.

“Cody’s artistic voice was there from the start — and it doesn’t whisper at you, it screams in your face,” Karen O wrote in an email. “I love that his ‘Fever to Tell’ cover is kind of ugly. It really captured the feeling of the early days of the band, which were an exquisite mess.”

Around the same time he conceived the cover art, Critcheloe began to release his own music, first on cassette. After meeting the Liars on tour, the band hired him to direct its 2005 clip for “There’s Always Room on the Broom.” From there, he developed a signature style, often employing stop-action animation and imagery from “The Wizard of Oz.” When he turned 30, Critcheloe started concentrating on directing videos for other artists because “people were more interested in what I was doing visually,” he said. “Also, it got harder to pull off a total DIY music thing.”

Still, he continued to write songs, gaining confidence along the way. The quality of his recent compositions encouraged him to create the new album, as did input from his producers and an array of like-minded guest stars, like the singers MNDR and Sky Ferreira. The music takes a pastiche approach to pop: art as allusion. “The collage aspect comes from Beck,” Critcheloe said. “It’s also from the queercore films of Bruce LaBruce, whose whole thing was stealing things and then turning them upside down.”

He thinks of the new music as much in terms of color as sound, specifically “electric blue,” inspired by a certain hue found on old VHS tapes. At the Club 57 exhibition, Critcheloe kept finding that shade in various artworks. “It’s the most beautiful color,” he said. “But it’s also violent.”

After leaving the museum, Critcheloe made his way downtown to a studio rented by his friend the fashion photographer Bruno Staub, for a session that would yield the new album cover. Its design doubles as its own “name-that-reference” pop quiz. The lettering he chose for “Ssion” mimics Oasis’ favored font, while the “O” image of the title borrows the logo for the Germs. For the cover shot, Critcheloe wore a gray suit and sported a studiously wan expression, both inspired by an early ‘80s photo he found of a young Neil Tennant.

“All of these influences coming together is realizing my teen dream,” he said. “I finally feel free enough to do anything.”