In Madrid in 2006 M.D. Trello started The Kiss That Took A Trip as a one-person project that would never play live. He quoted Brian Eno to say he was not a musician, built the music on computers and synthetic sounds, and refused the electronic label. The early demos (Dating Aphrodite, Worst Case Scenarios, The Dummy Family) stayed homemade. How The Mighty Have Fallen arrived in 2012, then Electroforest, Punk Cathedral, the Garlands EP, a long pandemic pause, the 2023 return with Hold Music, and Victims of the avantgarde in 2024. Twenty years on, Thirty In Twenty: The Collection lands on Cheap and Pretentious Records as the double album that gathers remasters, two remixes, two re-recordings, and three new songs into more than two and a half hours of music. Digital files remain free under Creative Commons. Payment is optional.
In the nineteenth century certain cartographers of the American West left blank spaces on their maps labeled “unexplored.” The label did not mean the land was empty. It meant the land resisted easy measurement. Trello has spent two decades preferring those blank spaces. Thirty In Twenty is the moment he fills them with the actual measurements. The album tracks the wearing down of intimate promises until love becomes a disease contracted long ago, a shiny coffin waxed with sweat, a feeling with no workaround. At the same time it records the collapse of collective ones: the isolation of a pandemic room where friends become a threat, the 1992 plea of Rodney King that people get along, the sentence J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled after the Trinity test, the rubble of colonization, the provincial nights of NyQuil and belts.
The production keeps the rooms closed until they break. Electronic pulses, dark synthetic bass, and crystalline arpeggios build the claustrophobia. Then saturated electric guitars and deep reverb tear the walls. The voice begins measured, almost a confession spoken in low light, then multiplies in doubles or cracks into a shout when the pressure rises. In other places it flattens into a documentary tone that simply reports the sentence. The sequence moves between electric accumulation and chambers of decompression. Skull and crossbones opens with stick counts, pulsing bass, and palm-muted guitars that turn into a wall of distortion as a secret brotherhood of the forsaken declares “Our day is coming” and repeats “What you gonna do about it?” Sound and immaculate answers with electronic cold and guitar detonations while the voice tracks a relationship as “a subtle disease / That I contracted long ago,” then shouts “Your pretty face now makes me sick” before dropping into the sparse electronics of a fall from grace. Mimosa keeps the bright keyboards and sarcastic drive until the music stops for the spoken “So now fuck off / My dear,” after which the chorus circles “Love is the kind of feeling / With no workaround.”
Forevermore turns the same edge into a dance-floor pulse. A solemn synth theme and dark bass march through the sudden call that “no one should feel safe,” then guitars open the refrain “Everything we love / Standing on the edge forevermore.” Tastes like copper stays on the drum machine and synthetic bass while the voice stays restrained on “Thin skin” and “A festering flesh, a kiss on a cut,” then multiplies on the repeated “Save me.” Blue is the flame keeps the dark electronic ballad form. Goodbye horses, the long cover of the Q Lazzarus song, lifts into a slower, almost transcendent register before Champions of delay and the Amplification of the senses [30 in 20 remix] open a chamber of near-silence, the latter stripped of drums and left with acoustic nudity. Crapola and 3 year flu drop into the clinical. The second of those places a medical monitor under the vocal and ends on bare piano as the body accepts its own end. Copernicus and The truth about Lucifer continue the darker electronic line.
We are what we protect arrives as the piano ballad that turns pandemic isolation into mutual care. The voice stays close and vulnerable on the title line while the arrangement stays chamber-sized. Three girls [30 in 20 re-recording] adds spoken sections that make the provincial decay tangible: NyQuil, Robitussin, pills in the purse, the lashes of belts. Happy birthday party monster and Bad heavens frame the sequence with ambient and instrumental space. Ambient punk places the Rodney King recording inside a post-rock build so that the repeated “Can we, can we all get along?” sits against the same walls of guitar that earlier tracks used for private rage. Heartbreak leave and Delirious romance keep the pop-rock and stripped forms. Vanilla killer [30 in 20 re-recording] reworks the older structure with new vocals. The dailies returns to the electric urgency. Irma Vep turns the fatal figure into a private myth: icy fingertips, a bed that “burns like lava,” the line “I’ve made a myth out of myself.” Everything is disappointing runs the social complaint through perfunctory words and circles of talk until the final piano and whispered “This very song is disappointing.” Comedian mum submerges the “Na-na-na” into delay and distortion so the mask of daily performance becomes the only audible text. Love + algebra sets the equation in chiptune arpeggios before the warmer synth-pop section, the voice cold on “Love is a shiny coffin / waxed with our sweat,” then open and layered on the repeated sum of love and hate.
Flower of gas and smoke takes the Oppenheimer recollection and places the flat, archival voice against post-rock detonations and industrial percussion. The mushroom becomes the title image. The sentence “now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” lands on the bare pulse of bass. Faulty logic can cost lives keeps the long instrumental accumulation until the final repeated accusation “You’re deadly, and I want you to know,” answered by the higher line that some things are doomed to fail. Stock footage [30 in 20 remix] closes the circle with the hypnotic electronic pulse, dark synths, then strings and distorted guitar. The voice stays tired on “This side of the barbed wire fence” and the mantra “Love shouldn’t take us here,” shifting from singular to plural as the track dissolves.
What holds the double album together is the precision of those measurements. The same architecture of closed electronic rooms and sudden guitar breaches serves both the private disease of a kiss and the public record of a nuclear test, a lockdown, a plea for calm, a colonized landscape. Twenty years of catalog become a single long itinerary that still leaves the listener standing on the same edge. The blank spaces on the old maps were never empty. Thirty In Twenty simply writes the coordinates.
