What about when you were kids?  Did you listen to music then?

Rox:  Yeah, there was music around.  Mostly our dad’s record collection.

Rach:  Yeah.  A lot of Weird Al, Cyndi Lauper. Twisted Sister was pretty big for us as kids.  Just as a backdrop I think.  Alice Cooper was big, and Twisted Sister. Swimming in the pond, coming in...we’d put on Twisted Sister, or maybe we’d put on some Weird Al.

Rox:  Twisted Sister, we thought the name was cool.  And I think they would call us that a lot because we listened to it. Like, ‘Where’s your Twisted Sister?’

Were there things leading up to the band that that developed the creative relationship between you two?

Rach:  As kids we were always kind of building worlds.  All of the zones had names.  It was maybe a russian doll thing, of world building, because our mom is a landscape designer and is really good at transforming environments with rocks and trees and waterfalls in a pretty magical way.

Rox:  And Florida itself is a big land project.

Rach:  Yeah.  We’d carve worlds out of worlds that had been carved, but it was still very wild.  There was a kind of falling-apart shack in the yard we’d hide under.  We called it Lipstick Land, because there was a sign that said ‘lipstick’ under there, in the dirt.

Rox:  We’d hide under there when people came over.

Rach:  I think having someone to retreat into weird worlds with, physically, probably helped us do that conceptually or artistically later.

Rox:  Rachal always sort of wrote.  I got a drum set when I was 17 or so, with the idea to start a band and have Rachal sort of front it, and to turn these writings I would find of hers into songs.  So when we first started doing music  it was more lyric-heavy.  A lot of, like, feminist rants.  Basically, it was screaming vocals that drove it, along with the drums.  We kind of fell off of that pretty hard though.

The vocal aspect?

Rox:  Yeah, or even it being centered around verbalized ideas.  It just became more abstract.

Rach:  A lot of our friends were in bands early on, but they were more straight ahead. It never felt right to be just a spectator.  And I think maybe what we wanted was a little weirder.

When did you begin to incorporate more electronics and handmade instruments?

Rach: Pretty early on.  A couple shows were more drum-oriented.  But I feel like pretty early on you [to Roxann] were making reel-to-reel tape loops and using that Califone.  And I was doing feedback through an old bass amp head.  

Rox:  Yeah.  I think a lot of it had to do with moving and maybe losing instruments.  It went to just scrap metal stuff for percussion pretty quickly.  It seemed more circumstantial, a lot of it.  Using what was available.  Then we had access to some weird old equipment that our grandpa had hoarded in some buildings.

Rach:  You made that record player out of a box fan to play those massive old radio station LPs we found.  

A big part of what’s interesting about the band is this specific kind of intuition, or psychic communication, you two share.  I wonder when that started being something you would present to other people?

Rach:  In Florida we didn’t have any outlet or formal creative direction.  It wasn’t really a possibility  in our younger years to do something performative.  But we did a lot of acid.  I think that definitely influenced us.

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