Rewritten and cleaned up after beaucoup downvotes.
Also a
New York City-based band, whose members are:
Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, guitar,
Moogerfooger, other asst. pedals
Don Fleming,
Fender Telecaster and busted
Arp AxxeJames H. "Jimbo" Dunbar III,
Fender Blues Deluxe
feedback, asst. keyboards,
glass sax.
Formed 1998. Genre:
NeMoCore.
The band has been described as
Canal Street art-noise, but that description is unnecesarily reductive, though a bone-simple description of foot music is hard to come up with.
The name of the band is, in fact, an acronym, meaning either
Fluxus-oriented oscillating trash or Fluxus-oriented oscillating
tones, depending on Moore's mood.
Actually, the band was initially named after an empty guitar case Dunbar was using as a sock drawer in his former
Canal Street apartment; the case had "foot" written in orange cursive on it.
Formed circa 1998, foot is without question Moore's wildest side project. The guiding premise, as revealed through the cryptic liner-note writings of a mysterious figure named
Capt. Nemo, is that the trio seeks to invoke the
Music of the Spheres thru telepathic and hands-on operation of
guitars,
amplifiers and
synthesizers. The genre deplores the use of drummers, citing the "tyranny" of rhythm.
Other than Moore, the members are:
Don Fleming, the guitarist and songwriter who founded
Gumball and the
Velvet Monkeys and former
Columbia A&R dude/man-about-town
Jim Dunbar.
foot, (yes, all lower-case) have only played a smattering of gigs, only maybe five ever. Four of them were in
NYC: Two
off-the-hook noisefests at the now-defunct
Cooler in
Manhattan's
meat-packing district, a third with a trio of white bodysuit-clad
performance artists (called "Actress") at a loft called the Greene/Naftali gallery on West 26th, and a fourth at some museum at which
Yoko Ono was present. That one actually got written up in
The New York Times.
The fifth and most recent performance, in Fall 2001, occurred outside a club near Moore's home in
Northampton, Mass. Dunbar wasn't available, so Thurston had to find
scabs. Filling in were
J Mascis,
Tom Verlaine and Gastr del Sol omnimusician/Wilco producer/embarassingly prolific writer
Jim O'Rourke. The fivesome cruised up to the club in the Gordon-Moores' white
Volvo station wagon, were handed a microphone, and proceeded to bleat
AM static thru the club's PA system, much to the bemusement of the folks who'd presumably come to watch the
indie-rockstars, um
rock out or whatever. According to Moore, O'Rourke savagely molested
Kim Gordon's big blue rubber
yoga ball during the performance, on the hood of the wagon, no less, which probably didn't help matters much, confusion-wise.
A sixth performance is scheduled for November 2002 at the
Zurich Institute in
New York, an event curated by the painter
Jutta Koether, who also happened to have written the
liner notes to
DGC's reissue of the
Sonic Youth's
Daydream Nation CD back in the early
1990s.