Audiopile Review: An artist’s best work is not always their most representative. No Funkadelic album rocks quite as straightforwardly as ‘Maggot Brain’. But did George Clinton ever release a better album? Arguable. Peter Hammill’s proto-punk masterwork ‘Nadir’s Big Chance’ is hardly typical of the art-rock icon’s output. But, heck, it might be an even better album than ‘Maggot Brain’. The Royal Trux brand, meanwhile, is widely associated with a unique (de)form of deconstructed blooz rawk. Delivered with typically 90s irony, albums like ‘Cats & Dogs’ and ‘Accelerator’ nevertheless rock with real swagger. And yet the severely melted song-forms and abstract psychedelic nightmares of ‘Twin Infinitives’ stand as the band’s best, or at least most ambitious, work. On reflection, maybe all this isn’t so off-brand. ‘Twin Infinitives’ simply takes the Trux’s semiotic pulverizing of ‘Exile on Main Street’ to its logical conclusion. A deliriously compelling rock-noise collage, it’s driven by a fuzzy dream-logic narrative that carries the listener along for its two-LP duration. This is, after all, one album that absolutely had to be a double. An off-brand, on-again classic.

Originally released in 1990, Royal Trux’s ‘Twin Infinitives’ is being re-issued in all its (yet to be translated) alien glory, by Fire Records. A dismantled overture that sprawls out over two records, an avant-garde masterpiece that was the spark for Drag City Records and generations of new sound seeking musicians.

Hailed in the same immortal breath as Beefheart’s ‘Trout Mask Replica’, the Velvets’ at their frenzied peak and Ornette Coleman at his most avant-garde, the duo of Pussy Galore’s Neil “Michael” Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema recorded ‘Twin Infinitives’ while imbibing all kinds of mind-altering substances to create an inadvertent blueprint for what the duo was building with moog’s, guitars and melodicas to name a few ingredients.

“Sounding like a subway ride inside a television inside an earthquake inside the end of the world and a pounding death rhythm of apocalyptic now.” Pitchfork

It is the legendary second album from the masters of the genre mashup – long before “genre mashups” even existed. Arguably, the term “mashup” was coined to describe what Trux, as they subconsciously scrolled through the radio stations of their lives.
The album’s chaotic sound and offbeat construction laid the foundations for a string of Royal Trux albums that spiralled between genres, tunings, and noise. Through the 90s they would re-invent the rock ‘n’ roll ethic, straddle alien surf music, re-align boogie rock, not to mention 80s hair metal, and confound critics by their wildly meandering and courageous rites of passage.

Remastered as part of a career spanning catalogue deal with Fire Records. The infamous and influential duo of Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty will be delving into the archive with a comprehensive reissue series, unearthing the vaults and revisiting what made them such a compelling benchmark for their contemporaries and imitators. Reawakening their prolific output within a new monochrome vinyl series covering 1988-1993, they begin with their seminal deconstructed rock masterpiece Twin Infinitives.