[1] Truax first came to prominence as a solo performer in the 1990s in New York City as one of a group of musicians and songwriters (including Lach, Jeffrey Lewis, Curtis Eller, The Burning Hell, Dibs, Boo Hoo and Beck) who made up the antifolk movement based around the Sidewalk Cafe on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

[2] The move was in part to remove the need to rely on other people to perform and to embark in a new direction that would distinguish his act from the hundreds of bands and singer-songwriters active in New York.

The "inventor" side of his musical act drew on his work as an animator on MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch and a fascination since early childhood with building objects out of whatever materials he had available.

Thomas's use of "primitive" technology, the often fantastical elements of his songs and gothic overtones (his website talks of his instruments "as though plucked straight from the mind of Tim Burton") have led to him being linked to the subgenre of steampunk.

[7] In 2020, Truax began work in Berlin recording with British drummer Budgie (Peter Clarke), formerly of Siouxsie and the Banshees who played along with Thomas’s mechanical drum machine Mother Superior.