Merv Pepler and Joie Hinton met as drummer and keyboard player (respectively) for Ozric Tentacles, a long-standing psychedelic rock band from Somerset. Although Ozric Tentacles incorporated elements of electronic music, Pepler and Hinton were drawn towards the rave-oriented dance music. In 1988 they collaborated on a project under the name of Wooden Baby which hinted at early rave and acid house sounds as well as numerous other styles, and by 1990, the project had evolved into Eat Static. Pepler explained: "There we were in Ozrics doing all this technically impressive, weird music with mad timings, and getting really involved with it, and this experiment that became Eat Static was a good excuse to ignore all that, get the synths out, and be as stupid as we could!"