Royal Trux - Twin Infinitives

Neil: [TWIN INFINITIVES] was recorded in San Francisco. We started rehearsing with a new band (Pat Johnson and Tom Rafferty) but that didn’t really rock, we didn’t really get along — probably due to drugs and booze. I taped a few rehearsals on a good reel-to-reel, though, and that band did manage to record a couple singles for Drag City.

As in New York, things fell apart — and in doing so, created possibilities.

Neil: When we got to doing the LP it was just a duo.

Jennifer: The dynamic duo…we could fly high and save people.

Neil: We wanted to let things happen. I took all the tapes I had: rehearsals, studio stuff that survived, other random shit like shortwave recording etc and cut that together in a long collage. Then I broke that into short segments arbitrarily, about the length of a good rock song. We dumped those segments onto multitrack, called them songs, and just started putting little patchwork bits here and there for the next year and a half or whatever it was.

Jennifer: If I wasn’t on my feet I was on my knees.

Like most master plans, the construction of Twin Infinitives belied the listener’s assumption of some kind of inter-related concept.

Neil: I’d go over to the studio and put down some hubcap and Flying-V on one thing, moog and cardboard box on a different thing. If we found some scrap of paper on the street with a note on it we’d sing it down as a vocal track. Just gradually building over the original tapes like trash collecting in the gutter. We noticed it was gonna be a double LP, so we edited the “Ape Oven” track out of a couple earlier sessions we had tried with the band and added more dubs to that to fill out the last side. That is based on Camp Concentration by Tom Disch. Also, the big 1989 Loma Prieta quake hit while we were working so the space between songs is equal to the duration of that quake.

Jennifer: I to the mother-fucking ching the Hex a gram held my master plan.

With their first Drag City 7” single selling out, another release was requested. Fortuitously enough, Royal Trux were finishing with the finishing touches to their first masterpiece.

Neil: The tapes eventually filled up and so it was done. The engineer and studio owner, Greg Freeman, really deserves credit for having the patience to work with us and also for helping to manage the sound. After we finished “Twin” we tried to do another LP with him but we never finished it and we drove him crazy with our boring antics. Sorry, dude.

Jennifer: Whatever dude.

When it was released in late 1990, Twin Infinitives raised the bar for avant-garde pop music. Listening to some of today’s pop-music, the influences seem undeniable. Once again, however, Royal Trux were rolling on.

Neil: After this period we started to concentrate on playing actual live concerts and so the band progressed in that direction. Ultimately, the whole thing was an epic fail though.

Jennifer: FTW MF!

SOLID GOLD TOOTH
ICE CREAM
JET PET
RTX-USA
KOOL DOWN WHEELS
CHANCES ARE THE COMETS
IN OUR FUTURE
YIN JIM VERSUS THE VOMIT CREATURE
OSIRIS
(EDGE OF) THE APE OVEN
FLORIDA AVENUE THEME
LICK MY BOOTS
GLITTERBUST
FUNKY SON
RATCREEPS
NEW YORK AVENUE BRIDGE

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