Chip Chapman is an experimental musician and member of The Los Angeles Free Music Society and Le Forte Four. LAFMS has been, since the early 1970s, the banner heading of a loose collective of experimental musicians in Los Angeles, California who were joined by an aesthetic based around radicalism and playfulness. Key players have included Joe Potts, Tom Recchion, Joseph Hammer, John Duncan, Dennis Duck, Juan Gomez, Kevin Laffey, Chip Chapman, Fredrik Nilsen, Jerry Bishop, Ace Farren Ford, Ju Suk Reet Meate, and Rick Potts.
Notable band configurations have included Le Forte Four, Smegma (who relocated to Portland, OR in the late 1970s), Solid Eye, Airway, Monique Experience, Foundation Boo, Extended Organ, and The Doo-Dooettes. Their influence is seen most immediately in other Pacific-coast "isolationist" experimentalists like Caroliner Rainbow, Sun City Girls, and The Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, as well as Japanese noise projects like Hanatarash, Hijokaidan, and Incapacitants.
A ten-CD retrospective titled The Lowest Form of Music, comprising 1970s recordings made under the LAFMS banner, was released by the Cortical Foundation and RRRecords in 1996. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.