Lungfish

Sound collages and poetry

Joab Jackson reported in ROX in September 1993 that Daniel Higgs and Asa Osborne met through Reptile House, a short-lived Baltimore band, and that Mitchell Feldstein and Osborne had played in Per Capita, while John Chriest had played in the Melvin. Higgs and Chriest made sound collages and tape loops to go with Higgs's poetry, and around 1988 they recruited Osborne and Feldstein. Chriest said we weren't interested in starting a band. Wikipedia's text says 1987, its infobox, Dischord and The Stranger say 1988. After the first record was made Higgs left for San Francisco and the others decided to document their work; Simple Machines released the tape, backed by Dischord, and a six-week US tour followed before Dischord asked them to record again.

Necklace of Heads (1990, Simple Machines) was recorded in summer 1989 at Inner Ear Studios, produced by Ian MacKaye, per Dischord, with Don Zientara engineering. Talking Songs for Walking was recorded in August 1991, and Dischord combined the two on a CD in 1992, remastered in 2003 (Dischord 066). Feldstein told Jackson they recorded all three of their albums in six days. Later albums on Dischord include Rainbows from Atoms (1993), Pass and Stow (1994), Sound in Time (1996), Indivisible (1997), Artificial Horizon (1998), The Unanimous Hour (1999), Necrophones (2000), Love Is Love (2003), Feral Hymns (2005) and A.C.R. 1999 (2012).

They toured Europe for about eight weeks in 1993. Setlist.fm has 115 setlists, with 39 in 1994 and the last years 2003 to 2005. Higgs began a solo career and Osborne records as the Zomes; Dischord calls the band largely inactive. The Stranger called them Dischord's longest-running act and its only band not based in Washington, D.C., and MacKaye said there's no fucking around with Lungfish. Cited fans include Low, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists and Shellac; Meadows said the band works with the Lungfish, an entity.