Climax Golden Twins

The Climax Golden Twins, originally the Seattle-based duo of Rob Millis and Jeffery Taylor, debuted with the double 7" Climax Golden Twins (Fire Breathing Turtle, 1994) but offered the first mature statements of their aesthetic with the cassettes Climax Golden Hiss (Union Pole, 1995) and Eyeless Fabrication (EF, 1995). Each of their albums concocts a surreal lo-fi collage of drones, electronic noise, voices, field recordings.

The 23 fragments of Imperial Household Orchestra (Scratch, 1996), recorded with eight guests, offer a good overview of their "concrete" techniques in assembling demented free-form jamming. After this album, Scott Colburn was added to the project.

At the turn of the century the duo concocted Dream Cut Short In The Mysterious Clouds (Anomalous, 2000), Rock Album (Fire Breathing Turtle, 2000), a set of 20 brief fragments that employ rock instruments and rhythms in a context similar to progressive-rock (the closest references being Fred Frith and God Is My Copilot), Session 9 (Milan, 2001), a haunting movie soundtrack that employs instruments in the style of the classical avantgarde as well as the usual arsenal of samples, and shifts the emphasis towards abstract soundsculpting, Lovely (Anomalous, 2002), which reworked some older material.

The combo calmed down considerably on Highly Bred and Sweetly Tempered (North East Indie, 2004), a collection of atmospheric adagios (Dead People), bluesy meditations (Billy McGee McGaw), surreal chamber music (Get Fat), dadaistic puzzles of sounds (Imperial Household Orchestra), and assorted musical jokes.

Climax Golden Twins (Conspiracy, 2006) contains a side-long collage of found sounds and a series of jams ranging from garage-rock to psychedelic trip.

5 Cents A Piece (Abduction, 2007), with the duo augmented with percussionist Dave Abramson, sounded like a compromise between their wild avantgarde side and their more prosaic rock side.