Climax Golden Twins

An experimental collage ensemble based in Seattle, Washington, Climax Golden Twins began with Rob Millis and Jeffery Taylor before Scott Colburn joined in 1996. Recordings made as far back as 1993 first appeared on the 1996 album Imperial Household Orchestra. The members founded Fire Breathing Turtle in 1994 to issue their own output together with other audio exotica, most prominently the continuing “Victrola Favorites” sets of rare 78s drawn from around the globe. The accumulation of tapes, CD-Rs, mini-CDs, singles, side projects, solo ventures, audiophile pressings, and further sonic artifacts makes collecting the group neither simple nor inexpensive.

Climax Golden Hiss (1995) and Imperial Household Orchestra (1996) present the band’s distinctive lo-fi collage, in which organic acoustic instruments intermingle with found sounds, electronics, and sampled exotica fragments. Interest in earlier eras of phonography surfaces on these records, as does the group’s off-kilter humor. Locations (1998) centers on voice and found sound. Dream Cut Short in the Mysterious Clouds (Anomalous, 2000) returns to the earlier approach, adding random noise-punk interludes, dreamy passages, and acoustics paired with field recordings.

Also released in 2000, “The Rock Album” (Fire Breathing Turtle) earned critical praise for its tongue-in-cheek immersion in rock attitudes while nodding to prog rock and the math rockers who embraced it. Session 9 appeared in 2001 as one of the band’s many film-music projects, offering a strange, haunted blend of non-objective soundscaping. Lovely (Anomalous, 2002) reworked earlier material. Highly Bred and Sweetly Tempered (2004) gathers samples from eerie 78s, found speech, Godspeed You Black Emperor!-style apocalyptic post-rock, and shimmery guitar tracks. Rob Millis released Leaf Music Drunks Distant Drums the same year. Scott Colburn owns and engineers at Seattle’s Gravelvoice Studios, and Jeffery Taylor owns and operates Seattle’s Wall of Sound record store. The band maintains a close kinship with the city’s celebrated cult act Sun City Girls and has supported the American experimental music underground since its formation.