FEED

Feed originated in 1995 when Maya Saito and Shinsuke Komiyama, then juniors at Tokyo’s International Christian University, started making music casually as a duo. Soon Akifumi Ikeda, a senior at the same school and already a guitarist-arranger in Love Circus, came aboard to handle guitar and arrangements. The following year vocalist Saito, who is of mixed American and Japanese parentage, departed Japan for New York University with plans to advance her studies and eventually teach English. The group made its live debut in 1998 at the CMJ festival’s “Psycho Nite” showcase in New York City. Early in 1999 drummer Taro Dai, formerly of Local Stations, became the fourth member.

The band spent 1999 performing across Japan and steadily cultivated an underground audience. A self-recorded four-song demo yielded a track that spent ten weeks on the CRJ college-radio chart during summer 1999. Support also arrived from the proprietor of the trend-setting department store DEPT and from the magazine Dictionary, which began running a regular column on the group. Their independently released debut album, Let Every Stardust Shimmer, attracted further listeners and drew the notice of Takeshi Kobayashi, founder of the Sony Japan–distributed Zone label. Kobayashi offered to finance a follow-up project while granting the band substantial artistic freedom. Lenny Kaye, guitarist for the Patti Smith Group, produced the resulting record, which retained the dense, detailed indie-rock approach already heard on Let Every Stardust Shimmer.