Like a lot of streets in the former east Berlin, Rosenthallerstrasse is largely shrouded in scaffolding. Sand is heaped in untidy pyramids along the pavement. A desolate patch of wasteland lies behind three billboards, each one defaced by adbusters sporting cans of dark grey paint. Opposite this is an anonymous-looking office building with a large ground-floor window. The interior is concealed behind ragged curtains, although there is a hint as to the activities that take place there. Stuck to the glass is an album sleeve, and around it are three words, drawn with childish enthusiasm in thick marker pen: buy this record.
According to a small photocopied sign on the grubby door, the people responsible for the cartoonish instruction are Chicks on Speed, and this humdrum office is their entertainment centre. The album, released on Chicks on Speed Records, is by Angie Reed, an artist, photographer and musician (she used to play bass with anarchic cabaret-pop band Stereo Total) who now records sultry electronica under the alter ego of Barbara Brockhaus - the world's sexiest secretary.
Berlin is full of people like Reed: people who are deliberately blurring the boundaries between music and art, working in the kaleidoscopic space where pop meets performance meets fashion statement. Perhaps the most visible - and certainly the most confrontational - is Merrill Nisker, aka Peaches. A 36-year-old Canadian who arrived in Berlin three years ago, Peaches has now released two raucous albums, each about as explicit as soft porn gets.
To accompany her lyrical celebration of triple-X-rated encounters, she has developed a live show that involves strippers (members of the audience included), tufts of fake pubic hair and some truly atrocious 1980s outfits. Her friend Chilly Gonzalez (otherwise known as 31-year-old Jason Beck, also a Canadian immigrant) wears similarly outlandish outfits, from helmets to safari gear, while delivering his deliberately amateurish raps.
No one, however, encapsulates the polymath, art-crazed activity of Berlin better than Chicks on Speed. The trio - Melissa Logan (33), Alex Murray-Leslie (also 33) and Kiki Moorse (36) - are about to release an album, 99 Cents, and publish their first book, It's a Project. As well as running three record labels (Chicks on Speed, Stop, and Go), they have a fashion business, designing and producing their own kooky, wobbly-stitched range of dresses, skirts, sweatshirts and accessories, sold on their brash website. In between, they create art installations, digital videos and vibrant collages. When Logan wants time off from all this, she acts in devised plays in Berlin's fringe theatres.
The trio started working together in 1996 in Munich, where Logan (a New Yorker) and Murray-Leslie (from Australia) were studying art and Munich-born Moorse was fashion editor at Vogue magazine. Three years ago they decided they could no longer function in what Logan describes as "basically a police state" and moved to Berlin. Now they believe they couldn't work anywhere else.
"Berlin is really the only place where it is still possible for people to do their own thing, their crazy ideas," says Moorse. "The city supports the arts a lot, and it's really cheap to rent a place - landlords are happy that people come in and do something, rather than leave places empty for years for the rats to take over. And there are great audiences here. In Munich, the moment you had a gathering of people, the police would come."
Logan left the US for Germany when she couldn't find an American art school that seemed sufficiently open-minded, and has no intention of returning to her home country any time soon. "My parents always complain that anyone who does anything interesting leaves America. But you can't criticise the government there - you can't even be in the Green party." The best thing about Berlin, she says, is its community of like-minded people, a lot of them women, who have arrived here from all over the world. "We have this real networking structure; we're like a gang. We wish everyone could live like this."
Chances are, however, few people could cope with living the Chicks' life if they tried. Spending a day with the band in Berlin is an exhausting business. At 9.30am on a sullen Saturday, Logan and Murray-Leslie convene at their headquarters, a messy, comfortable space full of intriguing clutter. Plywood fake guitars in myriad colours, used in the video to their current single, We Don't Play Guitars, lean against one wall; behind the main door is a rail of handmade dresses, several constructed from paper and gaffer tape, which they wear on stage. Everywhere there are shelves full of camera film, glitter, wooden pegs and cardboard boxes with "coloured leather", "knitted dresses" and "Mexican masks" scrawled on the sides.
Logan and Murray-Leslie are here to collect materials to decorate the Booth-Clibborn stand at the Frankfurt book fair, where their book will be prominently displayed. Moorse, it transpires, is laid low with flu; Logan and Murray-Leslie are still suffering the after-effects of hard partying two nights before. They start rifling through two huge folders crammed with photographs, scribbles and drawings, looking for images they can photocopy and collage.
The material, much of it included in the book, dates back to their first days together; it took Murray-Leslie and Logan seven months to sift through it all and collate it. (Moorse chose not to get involved, preferring to concentrate on promoting 99 Cents.) Although It's a Project reads like a retrospective, Murray-Leslie emphasises that it is more "a collection of excerpts from a work in process". Its scrawled text, documenting the clubs the trio set up and the various ways in which they have sought to undermine capitalism, radiates energy and humour - and makes it clear that while most people outside Germany know Chicks on Speed for their music, the trio really don't consider themselves a pop group at all.
In fact, despite the band's early slogan "Fuck art let's craft", calling them artists would be far from inappropriate. This becomes clear at the second stop of the day: a brunch meeting with Justin Hoffman, who runs a gallery about 45 minutes outside Berlin and wants Chicks on Speed to create the first exhibition of his 2004 programme. "We don't really know what we want to do in it yet," says Murray-Leslie nervously on the way to the meeting.
They barely discuss their ideas in the 10 minutes before Hoffman arrives, yet when he does, they immediately deliver a full concept for the show. Each wall in the irregularly shaped room will represent a chapter of the book, and there will be special evening events - performances by Angie Reed and a controversial Singaporean spoken-word artist called Chris Ho; a talk on rumbustious 1960s arts movement Fluxus - to liven things up. "It's rare we get to show all facets of what we do," enthuses Murray-Leslie. "At a club we have projections and stuff, but it's still just a club."
Hoffman initially seems a little perplexed by this fountain of ideas, but he becomes encouraged when Fluxus gets a mention and even, a little humbly, agrees to give a talk on the movement himself one night. "Fluxus stopped in 1993 and we want to force its continuance," asserts Logan. "So much of Fluxus was bullshit, or isn't valid any more, but the traditions shouldn't be stopped and lost: they should be made better. So we want to be the third generation of Fluxus. Especially because it'll really piss art historians off."
By the end of brunch, Logan and Murray-Leslie are already wilting. But they have to head straight off to another appointment: a remix session with their friend Mark Behler. A musician with a huge apartment, a daunting array of recording equipment and a love for coffee, he revives the duo with expertly made cappuccinos, then sets to work deconstructing We Don't Play Guitars.
While he adds aggressive drumming from an earlier remix and his own mutated keyboard melody, Logan kneels on the floor tinkering with her laptop and Murray-Leslie flicks through magazines. This is evidently what Chicks on Speed mean when they describe themselves in the first chapter of It's a Project as a "fake band". Which isn't to say that their music is entirely created by others - but it is a collaborative, magpie process, drawing on the talents of remixers as much as their own restless experiments with samplers and computer programs.
The final stop of the day is at a shop called Apartment, a dauntingly chic boutique where Chicks on Speed garments are sold alongside the latest creations by such leading designers as Marc Jacobs and Martin Margiela. Bearing in mind that 99 Cents and It's a Project are littered with denunciations of capitalism and dedicated followers of fashion, the Chicks' presence in Apartment seems a little weird.
But, Logan argues, it's all part of the group's political goal: eliminating the most exploitative aspects of capitalism. Murray-Leslie agrees: "We are in a capitalist system and we all know that. But we're taking away the greed factor, and creating more competition to companies like Starbucks, which have cannibalised everything."
This is part of the thinking behind the trio's current "overalls project". Working with designer Jeremy Scott, who has also made stage outfits for Madonna and Christina Aguilera, Chicks on Speed have designed their own canvas overalls, which they and a recruited cast of about 30 will wear for a re-creation of a Fluxus happening that Logan and Murray-Leslie took part in while at art school. Each participant will have to do a job (in the original version, this ranged from opening bottles to sweeping the floor) and keep doing it until Chicks on Speed decide the event is over. "The whole idea is to work and create and engage the audience to get a reaction," says Murray-Leslie. "The piece can never be finished unless you engage the audience."
Quite what fans of Chicks on Speed's music would make of all this is hard to fathom. The young, self-consciously hip crowd that crams into London's Metro five days later for a brief, rowdy set by the Chicks certainly seems discombobulated when Logan's between-song banter introduces the notion, repeated on 99 Cents and in It's a Project, that "capitalism is a shoddy set-up for suckers". But, says Murray-Leslie, they are simply trying to point out that you don't need to conform to be a success. "We're saying to young people that you can do your own record label, do your own gallery, do your own whatever and not rely on the big institutions."
The day in Berlin ends after midnight in a bar/restaurant called White Trash. As you might guess from the name, the mood here is heavily ironic, the dragonish head waitress setting the tone with her traditional folk outfit. Logan and Murray-Leslie hide in a back room surrounded by friends: fashion buyers, designers, film-makers, artists. These people have created their own community in Berlin, cocooned from the country's economic problems, thriving on the energy that is driving the city's continued reconstruction. No wonder Chicks on Speed can't imagine ever leaving.
· The album 99 Cents is released on Chicks on Speed Records/Labels on Monday. It's a Project is published by Booth-Clibborn in November. Chicks on Speed play the Islington Academy, London N1 (0870 771 2000), on November 3, then tour.
