Rick and Robert started Amoeba with the intention of creating music that they wanted to listen to.
If you had the chance to hear Rich and Davies' work together over the past 18 years, you might better understand how Amoeba came to the sound that it presents today. Unlike Rich's solo work, most of Rich and Davies' work in bands such as Quote Unquote and Urdu never saw wide public exposure.
Rich and Davies formed Quote Unquote together in 1979 along with bass/tape loopist Jon Spencer. When they started Quote Unquote, they could find no place in the Bay Area where they could hear the type of music they liked. Rich was listening to stuff like Cluster and Gamelan music, Davies was listening to John Martyn and Gong. Aside from the occasional performances by the Residents, Cabaret Voltaire, Tuxedomoon, and Factrix in San Francisco, there was not much of a "scene" to plug into, so they did the next best thing and made their own music, free of any context besides the surreal world they chose to create. Without the benefit of community, Quote Unquote remained in obscurity.
Their next attempt, under the name Urdu, was much more promising. At this time, in 1983, Rich and Davies had both developed more sophisticated synth rigs and started working with recordings of processed drum machine. With Andrew McGowan filling in the lower register with fretless and fretful basses, Urdu started developing a repetoire of songs with Rich and Davies singing, often accompanied by McGowan & Davies playing squelching bass counterpoint. Unlike the majority of electro-pop music at the time, Urdu went out of their way to avoid sounding like they had drum machines, but without trying to sound like they had a drummer.
Here's a sound-clip of Urdu... (you'll need the Quicktime plug-in for your browser. If you don't have it, you can download it here.)
Unlike Quote Unquote, Urdu was a real live band that actually played in front of people in and around SF. While the response was not negative, people generally seemed pretty confused by them. As Urdu's novelty wore off and they failed to muster the needed focus, Rich began to find more satisfaction in his solo instrumental music, and the band dissolved in 1984.
Davies went on to play in The Calm with Sean Kirkpatrick (later the drummer for Swell) and then moved to L.A. where he gigged with the art-rock outfit, The Telling, while staying somewhat connected to the music biz as editor for Music Technology and Home and Studio Recording magazines.
Robert's solo career as an instrumental composer took off during the late eighties; nevertheless, in 1991, Robert began writing some new songs under the band identity Amoeba. Together with friends Andrew McGowan (from Urdu) on bass, Dave Hahn on guitar and Matt Isaacson on drums, Robert tried to shape this early version of Amoeba into a vehicle to realize his strange vision of musical surrealism. After recording and releasing the Eye Catching 5-song CD, the group disbanded and Robert once again returned to instrumental work.
In 1994, with Davies back in the Bay Area, Robert and Rick began discussing the potential for a new Amoeba, thus laying the groundwork for the current collaboration. By the end of 1995, they completed Watchful and Robert began searching for a compatible label. As luck would have it, a friend of Robert's named Angel Romero was starting a new label called Lektronic Soundscapes, and expressed interest in Amoeba. (Angel was the former producer of a music television show on Spanish national television, which had filmed Robert performing with Steve Roach in Spain back in 1992.) Lektronic Soundscapes released Watchful in April, 1997.