Feed

Feed began in 1995 when Maya Saito and Shinsuke Komiyama, both juniors at Tokyo's International Christian University, began playing music together for fun as a duo; soon, Akifumi Ikeda, who was a senior at the university and a member of the band Love Circus, joined the band, playing guitar and providing arrangements. Saito, who had been the band's vocalist, left Japan in 1996 to attend New York University — of dual American and Japanese heritage, she had hoped to further her education and become an English teacher. The band would have their first gig at a CMJ conference in New York City in 1998 on the festival's "Psycho Nite." By early 1999, they were joined by a fourth member, drummer Taro Dai, who had played previously with Local Stations.

Throughout 1999, the band played shows in Japan and began to build up a considerable underground following. Their homemade four-song demo produced a hit that charted for ten weeks in the summer of 1999 on Japan's college radio chart, CRJ. A number of other underground cultural powerhouses got behind the band, including the owner of the hip department store DEPT and the magazine Dictionary, which gave the band its own recurring section in its issues. Their self-produced debut album, Let Every Stardust Shimmer, continued to gain fans and by the end of 1999 they had attracted the attention of Takeshi Kobayashi, the owner of the Zone label (which is distributed by Sony Japan), who agreed to put together a new album project with the band while still allowing them a good measure of creative control. The album was produced by Lenny Kaye, the guitarist for the Patti Smith Group, and shows off the same, dense yet intricate indie rock style that was featured on Let Every Stardust Shimmer.