These tracks are demo versions of songs that will one day, in 2012, be part of our sophomore LP, "Daly City/ Andalusia."

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Just after their debut full-length album was released in 2008, Little Teeth faced the biggest challenge of their career, they broke up. Two of the three founding members who had screamed and panted, cooed, cried, pissed, and bled into "Child Bearing Man" decided to leave the band. Dannie Murrie, now the sole heir, was left in the devastating wake of her life's dream falling apart, into her hands, onto a record that would collect dust on the Absolutely Kosher warehouse shelves.

The story of Little Teeth is a story of struggle, in all the ways a human can; the struggle with the world, with the self, with sexuality, morality, friends, family, with love - lost and fought for, contended and reawakened, that can heal, that can kill, that can rebirth. Little Teeth, in idea, originally started in 2003 when Dannie Murrie, freshly out to her parents, battling with depression, alienated from her mind (a guinea pig in the anti-depressant pharmaceutical circuit), and lonely, living in Sacramento, posted a personal ad on the “women seeking women” category of Craigslist, titled, “Smart, Young, Hot, Looking for Queer Musician Friend.” Amid the proposals of lonely housewives looking for a thrill, Dannie found an electrical engineering graduate from Yale University who had just moved to San Francisco, Ammo Eisu. Her response read: “I’m hot and I like Neutral Milk Hotel.”

Dannie Murrie knew, singing in church with her mother at the age of five, playing open mics with a twelve string guitar and vocoder in her teens, recording demos on a karaoke machine in Portland basements, in front of audiences of magazine cutouts and stuffed animals, that her life’s dream was to make music. But to make the kind of music she wanted, to create live the complex symphonies she heard in her head, she also knew she couldn’t do it alone. When over brief fiery emails of broad desire and bold direction, Ammo Eisu (who had swum in the same musical waters as Larkin Grimm and Dave Longstreth of The Dirty Projectors whilst at Yale) expressed even the smallest sign of understanding, Dannie dropped out of college (where she had been studying philosophy), packed all her belongings, and moved to San Francisco. Reeling with manic agency (coming down off one tri-cyclic, coming up on an SSRI), Dannie soapboxed the philosophy of her musical vision: a band that would soundtrack the human experience, humanism in its purist form, fashioned from diary rendered lyrics and sounds formed through experimental unlearning, valuing emotional response over theoretical or standard structural building blocks. Dannie and Ammo rented a warehouse and began creating songs bred of their shared experiences of mental, emotional, and sexual instability. Weeks before their first show, though, Dannie got tendonitis in both her arms. She was paralyzed for two and a half years.

Over the next year, Ammo, who had her own demons to combat, depression, alcoholism, a brand of nihilistic self-devaluing that can only hail from lesbian love affairs gone wrong at ivy league universities, not to mention coming out to her parents, supported Dannie by working late nights at bars. Dannie, whose mind, shattered by her inability to play, the drowning of her life’s dream, and a miasma of medication, began withering, as her body continued failing, slipped further into depression. By the end of 2005, Ammo and Dannie’s friendship had all but dissolved. Ammo bought a house in Noe Valley, Dannie and her dream were abandoned.

By 2006, Dannie lived in another basement near San Francisco’s city college and hadn’t picked up an instrument in two years. In a desperate attempt to keep music the central focus of her life, she enrolled in a sound engineering class, which is where 24, disgruntled, depressed, and paralyzed, Dannie Murrie met defiant and persistent, with blood-shot eyes, 17 year old Andy Tisdall. Consistent badgering on Andy’s part finally led the two to collaborating on a recording project. Taking extreme preventative measures (regimens of ointments, shiatsu, acupuncture, yoga, magnetic wraps, and specialized stretches) Dannie began writing and playing with Andy. When Ammo hesitantly joined them, Little Teeth was born again.

Dannie, Andy, and Ammo spent 14 months tinkering, toiling, experimenting in their Daly City basement studio, hand-crafting their debut full-length album, “Child Bearing Man,” which, owing to accolades and sponsorship from Marty Anderson of Okay, was picked up and set to be released by Absolutely Kosher Records. Towards the end of this emotionally draining process (rife with production disagreements and artist differences), on New Years Eve of 2008, Andy played a solo show with an experimental avant-pop band called Squeeky Rice. Sofia Bell, who had just graduated with a degree in creative writing from UC Santa Cruz, was the cellist of this band. Instantly attracted to talent and habit, by March, Sofia and Andy were living together at the Pink House, where the Little Teeth studio was located, where also Dannie Murrie lived with her girlfriend.

Over the next few months, Dannie finalized production on “Child Bearing Man,” while with a combination of spite and envy, Andy began recording a solo album. Andy and Sofia’s violent and alcoholic relationship came to an end in June when Dannie, who had secretly developed deep-seeded feelings for Sofia, admitted to being in love with her. Andy quit the band and tried to commit suicide, Sofia who was forced out of the house, slit her wrists and was hospitalized, Dannie who was blamed and ostracized as their house fell apart, sank again into depression, the electricity and water were shut off, kitties died of FIV, Ammo desperately tried to continue to book the tour required by their label to support their debut album, that had yet to be released.

In September, Little Teeth, who at this point was less of a band than three people obligated to scream and thrash next to each other, played their CD release show and set out on their first national tour, no longer as a band. Though the press the album received was raving, media attention quickly trickled to a stop as news of the band’s breakup overthrew promotional efforts; Absolutely Kosher wasn’t sure how to successfully promote a band that no longer wanted to exist. Though shows were played across the nation, neither Andy nor Ammo spoke a single word to Dannie over their two and a half months on the road. When the band returned home, Andy and Ammo started a new music project together called Zoo. Dannie, whose life’s dream had once again fallen apart, found the actualization of her love’s dream in Sofia who moved back into the house. (By this time, Dannie and Marty Anderson’s musical camaraderie had blossomed into artistic collaboration on both live and recorded material. Dannie was inducted into his live band, and after meeting Sofia, Anderson had both girls record on a track he was creating from the Bay Bridged, called “Goal.” - thebaybridged.bandcamp.com/track/okay-goal ) Just two weeks later, though, Sofia fell sick. She was hospitalized with a gastrointestinal disease that left her bedridden, withering, a guinea pig to painkiller cocktails and medical testing. Dannie’s dream was replaced by hospital waiting rooms as the months trickled past and the love of her life deteriorated in front of her eyes.

In the early mornings, before too much medication blanked her understanding, Sofia began writing the story of Little Teeth, of falling in love with Dannie, the last year of their lives, in a effort to recall before her mind recoiled. In a desperate attempt to keep music the central focus of their lives, Sofia and Dannie began singing songs together in bed. By May of 2009, a combination of chronic painkillers and Dannie’s constant care finally found Sofia, though permanently feeble, able bodied. The songs Sofia and Dannie had created out of sadness and desperation transformed into the first set of a new band they formed together called Kitchen. After a brief West Coast tour, the head of Absolutely Kosher told Dannie that the Little Teeth project required her attention, it would either have to continue with her, or be dropped from the label. Dannie asked Sofia to rebuild the project with her from the ground up, continuing with the ethos of experimentation and unlearning, but fortified by their love; the understanding that comes from two hearts when their bodies stop moving. She also asked Sofia to marry her.

The two immediately began writing new songs, practicing a new set, recording a demo and booking a second national tour for a new Little Teeth in support of the album the old Little Teeth created. The songs they wrote told the story of their tumultuous love, when a human is pushed over the precipice, the sound of that fall, the music of slowly rising. Sean Real, who had seen Kitchen and in a random act of faith offered a hand if one should ever be need, was asked to join them on the tour. The three scrambled desperately to build in two months a new band that would have the courage and conviction of one three years old. Inspired by Sofia and Dannie’s shared experience of truth and art, Sean dropped out of film school and dedicated himself wholly to the actualization of the girls’ vision. This vision, propelled by the motto, “we are no longer people, we are an idea,” took the three on an additional two national US tours and one European tour in support of “Child Bearing Man,” over the next two years. This album, a handbook for musical exploration within the struggle for self, was the rudimentary foundation upon which the new Little Teeth was able to flourish.

In December of 2010, Little Teeth began recording that efflorescence, a full-length effort, concurrently a sophomore and debut album. The devastating scale back of their label, Absolutely Kosher Records, currently finds the in-process album without a home, but their history has proven obstacle one of Little Teeth’s most powerful assets. Sofia, over the years of touring, continued to work on the biography of their band, transforming it into a novel that she edits during the day. As Dannie produces the story through sound, Sofia produces through prose, surrounded by the ghosts of dissention in the house where their lives were burned down.

Together Sofia, Dannie, and Sean channel deep song paroxysms transformed into an avant-symphony. Their live set includes a catalog of at least 12 different instruments, required to maintain the unique resonance of the different emotional landscapes that each song travels through. These songs oscillate from short, sweet punches, to freak-pop sing-alongs, noise-folk sonatas, to sprawling orchestras of beautiful chaos. Throughout its difficult process of deaths and rebirths, Little Teeth’s music remains ever and more so, commanding, conflicted, and utterly moving.