Thomas Edward "Tom" Wisse (November 12, 1949 – August 11, 1995), known professionally as Damon Edge, was an American musician. He was a founding member of the

post-punk Post-punk (originally called new musick) is a broad genre of music that emerged in late 1977 in the wake of punk rock. Post-punk musicians departed from punk's fundamental elements and raw simplicity, instead adopting a broader, more experiment ...

band Chrome and also recorded as a solo artist.

Biography

Damon Edge was born in Los Angeles in 1949. He graduated from Inglewood High School in 1967 before attending the

California Institute of the Arts The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) is a Private university, private art school in Santa Clarita, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the US created specifically for ...

. He earned a bachelor's degree in environmental arts in 1970."Damon Edge Website – Press"
, accessed April 24, 2010
accessed April 24, 2010 He started the band Chrome in 1976, taking inspiration from some of his teachers at Cal Arts and from a trip to Europe, where he heard Arabic music for the first time. He produced a lot of the early Chrome cover artwork. He began working at MGM and jamming with other musicians to create soundtracks for film. After recording the first Chrome album he set up Siren Records to release his own recordings. He moved to San Francisco in the mid 1970s and began recording further Chrome material. In the 1980s he moved to France after marrying the singer Fabienne Shine. He recorded several albums while living in France, some under his own name and others as Chrome. Edge and Shine returned to the U.S. in 1988, living in the Hollywood Hills, but they divorced in the early 1990s.

Death

In August 1995"Damon Edge at allmusic"
accessed April 24, 2010 Edge was found dead in his

Redondo Beach Redondo Beach (Spanish for ) is a coastal city in Los Angeles County, California, United States, located in the South Bay region of the Greater Los Angeles area. It is one of three adjacent beach cities along the southern portion of Santa Mo ...

apartment in California. He had been lying undiscovered for about a month until a neighbor alerted the police.

Melody Maker ''Melody Maker'' was a British weekly music magazine, one of the world's earliest music weeklies; according to its publisher, IPC Media, the earliest. In January 2001, it was merged into "long-standing rival" (and IPC Media sister publicatio ...

11/11/95 After the breakup with his wife he had begun to drink and smoke heavily. He had recently finished a new solo album in Germany.

Discography (solo albums)

* ''Alliance'' (1985) * ''I'm a Gentleman (7")'' (1985) * ''The Wind Is Talking'' (1985) * ''Grand Visions'' (1986) * ''The Surreal Rock'' (1987)

Footnotes

External links

Chrome websiteDamon Edge websiteDamon Edge at DiscogsDamon Edge Bandcamp page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Edge, Damon Songwriters from California 1949 births 1995 deaths Musicians from Redondo Beach, California 20th-century American singers Singers from California 20th-century American male singers American male songwriters 20th-century American songwriters