Biography

Lo-fi psychedelic explorers from New Hampshire, the group Mmoss were founded by guitarist Douglas Tuttle and multi-instrumentalist Rachel Neveu, who met when they were living in Boston. Tuttle first picked up a plastic guitar when he was four and advanced to a cheap acoustic six-string at the age of six, while Neveu began studying the flute when she was in grade school, eventually taking up keyboards as well. After spending a year working on a noisy indie rock project in Boston that failed to coalesce, Tuttle and Neveu became romantically involved and relocated to New Hampshire near the end of 2007. Tuttle and Neveu decided to start a new group with a different direction that fused pop, psychedelia, and improvisation, and after teaming with guitarist and bassist Justin Dearmitt (who, in true indie rock fashion, was working at a record store at the time), they spent several years experimenting with Tuttle's home-recording rig and homemade signal-processing gear, slowly assembling a set of tunes on a four-track cassette machine. While a number of drummers came and went during the recording process, the core trio of Tuttle, Neveu, and Dearmitt learned to conjure an impressive range of sounds in the former woodshop where they rehearsed, and in time they collected their tapes into an album they called i. The independent Burger Records label heard and liked i, and released the album in early 2011. Mmoss's debut earned enthusiastic reviews in the independent press, and with Rachel's brother Aaron Neveu joining on drums, the group hit the road, both in tandem with Woods (Aaron's other band) and on their own. The Chicago-based indie label Trouble in Mind was enthusiastic enough about i to approach Mmoss about releasing their second album, and the melodic but ambitious sophomore effort Only Children appeared in 2012. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi