The Climax Golden Twins, the brainchild of the Seattle-based duo of
Robert 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), reissued as Eerie Fragrance (Etude, 2009).
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.
Climax Golden Twins (Fire Breathing Turtle, 1998), better known as Locations, reconstructed the human
experience in several different places by layering real-world voices and sounds,
a madcap collage of field recordings and shortwave radio transmissions.
The fifth track introduced a disorienting element of percussions.
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), originally an immersive gallery installation.
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 that dives into their personal collection of
old records.
Climax Golden Twins (Conspiracy, 2006) contains a side-long
collage of samples from 78-RPM records ("a sort of conversation with the past",
as Robert Mills put it in a private correspondence),
and a series of jams ranging from garage-rock to
psychedelic trip.
Jeffery Taylor also played in saxophonist Wally Shoup's Spider Trio.
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.
AFCGT was a collaboration between new-wave revivalists A Frames and the Climax Golden Twins, whose
AFCGT (Fire Breathing Turtle, 2008) contains
twisted lo-fi instrumental garage-rock that harks back to the "no wave" of the
late 1970s.
Robert Millis debuted solo with the musique concrete
a` la Philip Jeck of
120 (Fire Breathing Turtle, 2008).
Millis and Taylor compiled a double-disc anthology of old records (some dating
from the 1920s),
Victrola Favorites: Artifacts from Bygone Days (2008), that ranges
from Chinese Opera to Persian folk songs. This was
originally a series of cassettes that started in 1995.
Climax Golden Twins' Scott Colburn (a member until 2004) launched Wizard Prison with II (Gravelvoice, 2007).
Robert Millis debuted solo with the audio collage
120 (Etude, 2009) that employs field recordings from his exotic travels,
snippets of conversations and old records. The centerpiece is the
twenty-minute All Balled Up, where all these elements converge to
create not only variety and movement but also some metaphorical drama.
The field recordings are juxtaposed with mutating ambient drones (secreted from whatever sources), originating a counterpoint or dialogue of sorts.
This ranks as one of the peaks of Millis' art.
AFCGT returned with
Square Microphones Tapes (Fire Breathing Turtle, 2009)
and AFCGT (Subpop, 2010).
