Füxa's first collaborative effort, which was immediately bracketed within the psychedelic and experimental category, was a collection of short, guitar and synth driven, primal instrumental space rock songs, recorded at home on a borrowed 6-track cassette recorder. The tapes were later brought to friend Erik Kassab of Gravity Wax for mixing and mastering at his Mission Control home studio. The resulting masters totaled over 90 minutes, and the best hours worth of music was selected for their first release, a hand colored, labeled and numbered cassette. This tape was sold at local indie record shops, and quite a few copies were given away by the band. College DJ Lunar Larry played many selections from this tape on his Friday night program, "The Life According to Larry", on WHFR radio. Nieman & Anderson at that time began to play at Detroit coffee houses, quickly building a cult following with their brief, psychedelic, erratic performances. The duo performed with the assistance of an old, literally falling apart Korg Mono/Poly synthesizer, often left to its own devices to produce loud, random arpeggios throughout the entire performance, which almost always emulated in a drum circle where audience participation was encouraged to "feel good" with the band. It has been suggested that the Detroit-based experimental rock band focus on a lo-fi, electronics-heavy blend of droning, treated guitars, vintage synths, and sparse percussion in the vein of suicide, Spacemen 3 / Spiritualized, and neu!. Ryan Anderson departed from the outfit in 1998, and Randall Nieman took over Füxa as a solo project. In 2001-2003 Ryan Anderson Joined Delta Waves to play drums and perform on a few recordings.
Releases
Their debut single was the self-released split with friends Gravity Wax, followed by the ground-breaking "Free Your Soul" EP, which featured the duo's best song to date, "Photon". Füxa's first full-length CD was a compilation of their first 3 singles, entitled "3 Field Rotation", released by England's Che Records in May 1996. To correspond with the release of the disc, the duo was invited over to London to play shows supporting the disc. Later that year, the band was featured on a split 7-inch with Stereolab, and performed a few shows with Stereolab in the United States. Other bands they have split recordings with include Azusa Plane, Orange Cake Mix, Flowchart and Bright. The band's second full-length came out in late 1996, entitled "Very Well Organized" - a collection of songs composed around a 1963 Hammond organ situated in the band's living room. 1997 saw the release of "Venoy", a contribution to Darla Records famous Bliss-out series of EPs. The band also focused on the publication of their fanzine, Masstransfer, with the first issue arriving in November 1997. Fuxa's swirling electronica and atmospheric downbeats are suggested to evoke a forgotten transient landscape. Füxa's first album in a decade, Electric Sound of Summer, was released on Rocket Girl in 2012. Both Britta Phillips and Dean Wareham donate vocals, as does Seefeel’s Sarah Peacock, while members of Spiritualized, Spacemen 3 and Spectrum all contribute. It is suggested to be the cross-pollination of these collaborators’ talents which gives Electric Sound of Summer its strength and bottomless depth. It was dubbed as a "celebration of creativity; of community; of music past, present… and Füxa". Comprising a sixteen-strong army of collaborators, including BJ Cole, Ann Shenton of Add N to, Judy Dyble and Britta Phillips. Füxa's tenth full-length album, Dirty D, was released on Rocket Girl in 2013. It is suggested to display a penchant for swirling electronica and atmospheric downbeats that have been compiled in a way which is constantly pleasing to the ear. The dirty ‘D’ of the title could refer to a number of disquieting facets of today's society – the dominance of Disney, the illusion of democracy, dereliction – and, in contrast to Disney's sickly saccharine supremacy over our children's imaginations.
