Spoonfed Hybrid

Spoonfed Hybrid came together in 1993, mirroring the sharp ingenuity and avant-leaning pop sensibilities associated with Ian Masters of Pale Saints and Chris Trout of AC Temple. Masters had grown frustrated with the restrictions imposed by his former group’s pop format, yet his partnership with Trout offered space to tinker freely with texture and form, unencumbered by label expectations or the question of whether a drummer would sit out half an album. Their self-titled debut appeared the same year on Guernica, an imprint of 4AD, drawing modest attention from Pale Saints devotees and listeners drawn to more adventurous sounds. Two years later Farrago released Hibernation Shock, whose striking opening cut pulsed with burbling electronics while the rest of the record felt somewhat sketchy. Also in 1995 Masters teamed with Warren Defever for the exquisite ESP Summer and kept operating his enigmatic Friendly Science Enregisterments label.