In Dallas in 1992, there were two radio outlets for new electronic and dance music. On Saturday nights, DJ Jeff K hosted his “Edge Club” show on the Edge, and on Thursday nights DJ Marty DeSade manned the decks for “Ground Zero” on public radio station KNON. Shortly after returning from California, I sent a cassette of the “Mind Event” demo to KNON and gave Marty a call on the request line the next week. He invited “the band” up to the studio for a live interview the following week and played “Modular” that night. I had finally received some airplay. Yes, it was only on a public radio station, and yes, there were probably only twenty people listening at the time, but this was a big deal for me. Years of playing in bar bands and recording weird music in my bedroom had culminated in this singular achievement. The next week, Todd and I drove to the KNON studio, which was housed in a rundown old colonial home in a scary section of East Dallas. Marty turned out to be a great guy with a good sense of humor. He interviewed me on the air and played “Modular” again for the benefit of the fifteen people listening. Brimming with confidence from this experience, I decided that I needed to make an actual record and leave the days of making cassettes behind. Kerry was never able to find a regular job the entire time he lived at the Green Oaks apartment. After picking up his share of one too many cable bills, I knew I wouldn’t be renewing the lease with him. In June 1992, he moved back to Oklahoma City and I moved to a small one-bedroom apartment in Bedford. There, I rerecorded “Modular” using a Roland TR909 drum machine that I’d discovered in a Grand Prairie pawn shop for $200. I set a goal of releasing a four-song EP by the end of the year, and recorded “Delta Two-Five” that August. I only needed two more songs. I had written “Frontier,” but Kerry had taken the master DAT back to Oklahoma City with him, so I decided to rerecord it. Unsatisfied with the audio quality of the songs I’d recorded to that point, I splurged for a pair of Mackie 1604 mixers. The difference in quality is very noticeable on the first EP; side A was recorded with the Mackies and side B was recorded using my old Crest 16-channel PA mixer full of bar smoke and dried beer. I rerecorded “Frontier” with the new mixers and set to work writing the final song on the EP, “Past Passion.” “Past Passion” sounded a lot different than anything else I’d recorded. It’s shuffling drumbeat was peppier, and the song featured more synthesizers and fewer sampled sounds. Listening to it now, it’s an obvious 808 State ripoff, but I didn’t realize it at the time. It’s still my least-favorite x-eleven song, but it’s the only one that most people ever got to hear. When I finished recording “Past Passion,” my EP record was complete. I only needed to come up with a name, some artwork and have the records pressed. I decided to call my project “x-eleven”, in honor of version 11 of the X Window System, the graphical user interface for UNIX workstations that’s still around today. Pontiac had produced an awful “X-11” compact car in the early 80s, but most of them had been crushed by 1992, so I guessed that no unfavorable association with the name still lingered in the public consciousness. Coming up with EP artwork was a bit difficult. The only computer I had was my little plastic Amiga, and the desktop publishing software available for it wasn’t that great. Being basically broke after purchasing so much equipment, I couldn’t have afforded any software anyway, so I decided to just write the raw PostScript code and feed it to one of the printers at work. I picked up a couple of PostScript books and downloaded a public domain Amiga app that displayed PostScript files on the screen; after many late-night hours of tweaking code, I had some decent-looking label art. I would release the EP under my own label, “Rabo Records,” named after Rabo Karabekian, the abstract painter in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Bluebeard.” I thumbed through the yellow pages and found Dallas’ only record pressing facility, A&R Records. For $600 you could get a mastering session and 100 records printed with single-color labels. I booked an appointment in November and a couple of weeks after approving the acetates, I picked up two extremely heavy boxes of 12” EPs from the A&R office and loaded them into my car. As I would soon learn, it’s a lot easier to make records than it is to get rid of them.