Galen Herod grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and began making electronic music in 1979 with equipment he had no money to buy commercially. His solution was his friend Gary Dukarich, an electronics hobbyist who designed and built oscillators, filters, and sequencers from scratch. Working with these handmade instruments and tape loops in the Phoenix area, Herod produced a series of cassettes that circulated primarily through the distributor Eurock and directly through personal contacts. His early tape work is abstract and austere — VOD compared it to Conrad Schnitzler in its rigour and its refusal of conventional musicality — built from pure electronic sound without ornamentation or compromise. In late 1981 he met guitarist and vocalist Greg Horn at the PBS television station KAET where both worked, and the two formed Tone Set, a minimal synth-pop duo that would receive a rare enthusiastic endorsement from Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo.

This first double LP (VOD139.GH1/2), issued with a bonus 7", draws on Herod's earliest three official self-released tapes from 1979 and 1980: Xom, Gulag, and Limacon. The recordings are long, patient, and frequently astonishing in their formal ambition: side-long pieces built from slowly shifting electronic textures, pulse patterns and tape loops that create a kind of Arizonan desert minimalism entirely disconnected from any European precedent. First time on vinyl, in a limited edition of 200 numbered copies with individually numbered certificate.