Disism was conceived by Charles Rice Goff III and Killr "Mark" Kaswan in 1985. For the six years previous to that time, Goff had been primarily focusing his sonic artistry with Steve Schaer in a project called –Ing. Kaswan had joined with Goff in several avant garde improvisational sessions during that time, however. In early 1985, -Ing lost its momentum, and Kaswan had just returned to the USA from a long stay in Barcelona, providing the perfect opportunity for the Disism seed to germinate.

The first projects that Disism dived into were driven by a tape loop system similar to the “Frippertronics” system made popular by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno in the 1970’s. Whereas -Ing had written performance pieces for guitar and synthesizer which incorporated such a tape loop system, Disism took this idea further by creating performance pieces which not only incorporated musical instruments, but which incorporated prerecorded tapes as well. Goff and Kaswan spent a lot of time creating these tapes and figuring out how to arrange their contents to play in time with the tape loop system.

Because Goff and Kaswan had had a great deal of experience improvising sounds with one another before their Disism adventures began, improvisation was also an important element in Disism’s approach to composition and was incorporated to varying degrees in all of their early works.
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