X Marks The Pedwalk

Founded by Sevren Ni-Arb and Regan Eracs, the German industrial outfit X Marks the Pedwalk took the Euro-synth pop sound of the 1980s and pushed it toward harder electronic pulses alongside more alternative lyrical directions. Ni-Arb had already contributed keyboards to multiple synth acts throughout that decade, yet he and Eracs launched Scarecrow as a new project in 1987. The pair issued the Black Door EP under that name, then switched to X Marks the Pedwalk—drawn from a Fritz Leiber short story—in 1989 to unveil the single “Arbitrary Execution” on Zoth Ommog. Two further singles, “Danger” and “Disease Control,” appeared the following year, after which the duo delivered their first full-length effort, Freaks, in 1991. Additional EPs surfaced across 1991 and 1992, at which point Eracs departed; Ni-Arb brought in his brother Raive Yarx to fill the vacancy. The siblings’ initial outing, Human Desolation, surfaced in 1993. One year later the group secured a deal with the U.S. industrial imprint Cleopatra, and their first album under that arrangement was The Killing Had Begun. A collection of remixes and B-sides originally titled Air Back Trax on Zoth Ommog was reissued by Cleopatra late in 1994 under the title Abbatoir. In 1995 the American-only compilation Four Fit emerged alongside the band’s fourth studio album, Meshwork. Ni-Arb also maintains several parallel ventures, among them Ringtailed Snorter, A-Head, Blind Vision, and U-Tek.