In December 1991, Eric graduated from UT Arlington and was accepted to a graduate program at Texas A&M in College Station. The $500 a month rent for our two-bedroom apartment was way over my budget, so I had to find a roommate quickly. My contact at the Guitar Center down the street was Kerry, who worked in the keyboards and pro audio department. He was an amiable guy from Oklahoma by way of L.A. who had played drums for the Nixons at one point. He’d been to a couple of the weird parties at our apartment, so when I told him I needed a roommate he volunteered. He moved in on January of that year, and in his box of CDs was a copy of 808 State’s “ex:el.” One day I came home from work and heard the first track, “San Francisco,” playing on my stereo. I was dumbfounded -- there, in my shitty Arlington apartment overlooking the Trinity river bottoms, I was listening to the sound of the future. The rolling hip-hop drumbeat, the indecipherable vocal samples, the unapologetically harsh synthesizer with its oscillators tuned in fifths, it was all there. It was electronic music with depth and soul, more muscular and more subtle than the best industrial tracks. At that moment I knew this was the sound I wanted to make. Kerry was also a musician, so we decided to collaborate on some tracks using the sound of new acts like 808 State and the Shamen as a prototype with the working title “Mind Event” for the project. The studio was already set up in the dining room area, so Kerry moved in his Korg Wavestation and we began working. Kerry and I would complete a total of four tracks together, with me writing two (”Frontier” and “Modular”), Kerry writing one (”Who Am I?”), and both of us sharing the writing duties on the fourth (”Barbarian”). “Frontier” and “Modular” would eventually both be released as x-eleven tracks, and the centerpiece sample in “Who Am I?” would return in 1993’s “Flight of the Phoenix.” Immediately after moving into my apartment, Kerry lost his job at Guitar Center, so he had lots of free time to work on music. Luckily, he was able to keep up his rent payments by running sound for a local bar band at night. In March of 1992, Todd and I drove to California during the spring break of his last semester of school. He was considering a graduate program at UCLA, so that seemed a good excuse as any for a 4000 mile round trip journey over 9 days. In California we learned just how big the techno music scene was becoming. The newspapers in San Diego and San Francisco were running stories about illegal warehouse parties where crazed youths under the influence of designer drugs danced all night to strange electronic rhythms while inhaling Vick’s Vap-O-Rub. To a sheltered kid from the North Texas suburbs, this was deeply weird and undeniably compelling. I knew that I had discovered something important, something that I needed to become part of. We returned from San Francisco after dancing all night in a dark-wave club, driving a hallucinatory 36-hour long burn past the date palms, the Salton Sea and back to the endless expanse of the Texas prairie.