Dinos Chapman is the "David Lynch of the Dancefloor"

Not many artists go from sculpting Nazi figurines to playing DIY techno at Sónar. But then again, Dinos Chapman's work has always fallen far from the usual parameters of normality. In fact, much of his art seems tailor-made to offend bourgeois sensibilities. As one half of the Chapman Brothers (the other half is his brother, Jake), the 52-year-old artist has an oeuvre that includes fake dog turds, dismembered corpses, bronzed sex dolls, and Adolf Hitler watercolors. (Worthy of note: the brothers were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2003.)

Last year, Chapman decided to venture into electronic music. The culmination of ten-odd years tinkering around his basement studio, his debut album Luftbobler landed on The Vinyl Factory last year. According to Chapman, it was inspired as much by Stockhausen, Throbbing Gristle, and Squarepusher as it was by horror movies, insomnia, and boredom. Its release prompted the Wire to dub him the "David Lynch of the dancefloor." It's easy to see why: the record brims with sounds of buzzing flies, creaking swings, clacking drum machines, and disembodied vocals. Clearly, the gallows humor that marked his artistic output translated well into the realm of music.

More recently, Chapman also remixed Crystal Castles' melancholy classic "Untrust Us," distorting it to nearly unrecognizable levels. The original's distinctive vocals are no longer the focal-point. Instead, they leak in and out, interrupted by the beeps and squeaks that ride over them.

"What I love about electronic music [is] you can turn strange things on the internet into songs," Chapman tells me over Skype from his home in London. In Luftbobler, "I've got Kylie Minogue being interviewed by someone who kept asking about plastic surgery. David Lynch talking about drawing. A man watching porn films and describing what he's seeing for a blind audience." Of course, none of this is recognizable on the album; the samples are distorted, or else cut into ribbons and sewn into unrecognizable new forms.

"This sounds wanky," he continues, "But I don't want to make songs. [My music] is like sound equivalents of objects—they exist in their own right." He compares his work to Marcel Duchamp's readymades. In the same way that Duchamp took a urinal, flipped it on its side, and declared it art, Chapman steals Kylie Minogue vocals off the Internet in order to mangle, degrade, and eventually turn them into music.

On October 4, Chapman will bring his Luftbobler show to the United States for the first time. Projected visuals star the artist himself, dressed in a rabbit costume and running around doing "stupid things." The relationship between what you see and what you hear is unclear—and that's the point. "I'm trying as hard as I can to have a light-handed approach," Chapman says, "I don't want the music to be the soundtrack to the films. The link between them should be elastic." Instead of a clear narrative, Chapman prefers that meaning is "implied."

Ultimately, he admits that the main purpose of his audio-visual show, with its throbbing images drenched in over-saturated colors, is to divert the audience's attention away from his silhouette, standing inert at the controls—and towards a more engaging kind of spectacle. But what will he do if the kids demand more? "What you do is get a dustbin full of assorted drugs and you throw it at the audience," he says with a mischievous grin. ""Then, they're really happy."

Because we love you, enter the contest below to win signed vinyl and two tickets to MoMA PS1's Sunday Sessions with Dinos Chapman and Justin Miller on Sunday, October 5.