As the 3rd millennium A.D. engulfs us, we are faced with the opportunity to abandon those aspects of culture that we may deem unwanted, embarrassing, distasteful, unenlightened, etc. Forms that have stood in place for centuries, cultural habits that attempt to pass for traditions--all of these are the undergrowth that can be burned away at this juncture. Among the seedlings that will inevitably grow up from the ashes, you are likely to find Twin Princess.

Twin Princess is not a band. The members of Twin Princess are not trudging from club to club in a van, guitars and amps in tow. There are no rehearsals and there is no rehearsal space. They never discuss getting record deals or strategize how to become successful. It's merely an art project. They would be happiest if they could make one copy of their music and put it in a gallery. Were they interested in making demo tapes, they would only be sent to museum curators.

Bootsy Holler is one of Seattle's most prolific and notorious artistes. Photographer, writer, painter, exhibitionist, clothing designer, metalworker, her works have infiltrated numerous strata in the city-her photographs appear in local magazines on a weekly basis, and various clubs, shops and restaurants around the region feature her art and/or metal installations. Kickstand is a well-known producer (NOT a DJ, he is quick to add-"I am not interested in entertaining escapist masses", he told me) who owns one of the largest collections of modern and vintage studio equipment in the Pacific Northwest (and often loans out pieces of it to other producers, free of charge). Together they create the sounds that become Twin Princess.

The creative devices they use include: Role reversal-Bootsy engineers, Kickstand photographs, neither having had previous experience in those roles; using digital recording technology to turn a few seconds of sound from an intentionally abandoned piece into a new, unrecognizable hour of music, from which different microsections are spliced out to again be expanded into new songs, a technique Kickstand refers to as "crux n' paste"; in a controversial piece unveiled at the Experience Music Project this fall, Kickstand and Holler used the contents of dozens of diaries they had acquired from deceased persons who had left no heirs, scanned in and randomized, and set to music based upon the occurrence of letters pertaining to notes on a scale-A through G, flatted when starting a word and sharp-ed when ending a word-letting whim dictate the rhythms and meters.

The music on this anthology represents the only examples of their work that they have allowed to be made 'permatemporary', a word they use to describe anything that is stored exclusively on a digital format. Bootsy explains: "there are parchment scrolls containing information that has endured being stored for centuries. Nothing that is stored in the digital medium is going to last much beyond the end of this century, nor is it intended to. We have become a society obsessed with saving every keystroke, every bank transaction, and as soon as they are stored we subsequently never refer to the stored information again. We simply move on and create more things to be stored."

The Complete Recordings contains six tracks including both songs from the Twin Princess 7" single Althea/Sorry, and a cover of Nancy Sinatra's "Something Stupid."

NOTE: Kickstand=Ken Stringfellow.