Built to Spill

In 1993, Doug Martsch of Seattle’s Treepeople returned to Boise, Idaho to escape the city, stop touring and record with an open-ended cast of backup musicians as Built to Spill. Over the next few albums and singles, Martsch proved himself to be one of indie-rock’s most striking songwriters and guitarists. His songs are divided into…

Lords of Acid

Lords of Acid were the only band to successfully make the transition from Belgium’s new beat movement — a slow-pounding late-’80s precursor to techno — to techno itself. The group first emerged in 1988 as a collective of ubiquitous new beat musicians and producers (Praga Khan, Jade 4 U, Oliver Adams) fronted by Nathalie Delaet,…

Future Sound of London

Under various group names, former electrical engineering students Gary Cobain and Brian Dougans have been allied with nearly every electronic dance-music trend that has swept through England since 1986. In those years, the two have also moved from recording music representative of a specific genre to transcending any single style. Their first hit, 1988’s “Stakker…

Coolio

Coolio achieved a rare thing in the music world: maintaining his underground credibility while playing the pop game for all the exposure it can give him. His braids-to-the-sky hairdo became a trademark as familiar as Michael Jackson’s mono-glove, and every one of his hits relied on a single formula, a wise rap riding on the…

Pizzicato Five

There is a persistent stereotype in America that Japanese bands simply attempt to replicate American and British pop, and that the charm of the music is in how they get it wrong or unwittingly fall into the culture gap. At first listen, that may seem to be true of Pizzicato Five. But the Tokyo group,…

Treepeople

Three years before the great grunge rush of 1991, former members of a Boise, Idaho punk band called State of Confusion moved to Seattle in search of an audience and a musical community. Their new band, Treepeople, lasted as long as the grunge hype did, but the quartet’s dense post-punk music (as well as its…

Elliott Sharp

There aren’t many musicians who need so many different band names under which to work. But Elliott Sharp has that many different ideas, sounds and styles swirling in his clean-shaven head. And, at the expense of a linear career that could earn him bigger bucks or notoriety, he has explored them all. Sharp is a…

KMFDM

Germany’s KMFDM began as a quartet of low-tech living-room musicians in Hamburg who unintentionally found themselves in synch with Chicago’s Wax Trax! label, where groups like Ministry were attempting the first fusions of the strident noise of industrial music with the electronic dance rhythms of disco. The mix of sampled speeches, mechanical funk beats, sound…

Faust

First active in the early ’70s, Germany’s Faust played a mix of jazz, folk, minimalism, rock, noise, pop and modern classical that refused to be defined. In doing so, its music managed to become allied with a number of ground- breaking styles. Industrial noisemakers trace their roots back to Faust as one of the first…

Contributors

These folks either wrote reviews that appear on the site or wrote for Trouser Press magazine. If anyone listed below cares to E-mail us with a link you’d like added, just let us know. And ditto if anyone is AWOL from this list. Grant AldenDavid AntrobusJem AswadTroy J. AugustoMichael AzerradCary BakerMichael BakerEmily BeckerJohn BergstromArt BlackJohn…