I decided to try my hand at recording some tracks in the style of the industrial bands I was listening to at the time, like Nitzer Ebb and Front 242. Before I could get started, I needed equipment, and the Guitar Center down on Collins Boulevard had plenty of it. I started with the best drum machine available at the time, the Roland R-8. To this I added a TEAC portable DAT deck and a pair of Boss SE-50 effects units. I still had my old Prophet-2000 sampler and Oberheim OB-8 synth from my bar band days in college, so all I needed was a sequencer and I was ready to go. At this point I was out of money, so the only option available was the Amiga 1000 computer I’d used for programming projects in college. It booted from an 880K floppy disk and was made from Hasbro-quality plastic. But it had amazing color graphics and ran an excellent sequencing program called Music-X. In addition, the Amiga was at the center of a strange scene of underground “demo” programmers in Europe who produced spectacular programs of graphics, video, and music that were the prototype of the x-eleven videos to come. My friend Todd (who would later become x-eleven’s video artist) and I would spend hours drinking beers and watching the latest psychedelic (and frequently virus-laden) Amiga demos we’d downloaded from ftp sites in Finland over a 2400 baud modem. Remember, this is 1991 we’re talking about, and this was amazing stuff at the time. With the Amiga and Music-X, the x-eleven studio was in place. Its basic configuration would remain unchanged until I gave up music for good. I recorded four tunes in the fall of 1991. Todd collaborated on 3 of them, “TG1”, “TG2”, and a cover version of The Knack’s “My Sharona.” “TG1” and “TG2” were dark, industrial affairs in the vein of “Tyranny For You”-era Front 242. “TG1” was notable for including the sound of a digital alarm clock heavily processed by the Boss SE-50. “My Sharona” was a one-off joke in the spirit of the great old Revolting Cocks records. The fourth untitled tune, recorded without Todd in December 1991, was also in the Front-242 style and was the most refined of the four. It would be my last industrial song -- techno music was about to enter my life.