Trin Tran

Trin Tran originated as Steve Coombs’s solo endeavor once his mid-’90s outfit Xerobot dissolved. That earlier group had anchored the modest local circuit in Madison, Wisconsin, before relocating to San Francisco in 1999 and disbanding soon after. Having handled drums in Xerobot, Coombs came back to Madison intent on creating music yet disinclined to join forces with others. An unwavering preference for unmediated, computer-free live performance prompted him to launch the project in 2001, simultaneously handling vocals, guitar, drums, and keyboards in real time and shaping a jagged post-punk style indebted to Devo, the Fall, Klaus Nomi, and the fiercer rock impulses that had animated Xerobot. With most hours absorbed by employment and an expanding household, Coombs advanced the endeavor only during brief intervals, gradually amassing a stockpile of basement tapes while appearing at sporadic hometown gigs. Until the arrival of the more ambitious 2007 album Grows a Rose, his releases circulated chiefly as self-duplicated CD-Rs and scattered 7-inches. In the early 2010s garage-rock figure Ty Segall encountered the project, became an ardent supporter, and elected to reissue earlier material through his Drag City subsidiary God?, resulting in the 2012 collection Dark Radar. An EP of fresh songs, Far Reaches, followed in 2014 on Castle Face Records, the imprint operated by Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer. To promote these records Trin Tran began performing more frequently, enlarging the original one-man format into a three-piece that featured Coombs’s son on guitar.