The Sub Pop Years
(2009)

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Compiled from Damon & Naomi's four albums for Sub Pop Records (1995-2002)

"So many beautiful, evocative, and (to these ears) classic songs." -- Brandon Stosuy, Stereogum

1 - Eulogy to Lenny Bruce (from Damon & Naomi with Ghost)
2 - I’m Yours (from Playback Singers)
3 - Forgot to Get High (from The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi)
4 - New York City (from Song to the Siren: Live in San Sebastian)
5 - Eye of the Storm (from Playback Singers)
6 - Judah and The Maccabees (from Damon & Naomi with Ghost)
7 - Tour Of The World (from The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi)
8 - Song to the Siren (from Song to the Siren: Live in San Sebastian)
9 - The Navigator (from Song to the Siren: Live in San Sebastian)
10 - The Mirror Phase (from Damon & Naomi with Ghost)
11 - How Long (from The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi)
12 - The New World (from Song to the Siren: Live in San Sebastian)
13 - The Great Wall (from Damon & Naomi with Ghost)
14 - In the Sun (from Playback Singers)
15 - Turn of the Century (from Song to the Siren: Live in San Sebastian)

Damon Krukowski – Guitar, drums, vocals
Naomi Yang – Bass, harmonium, vocals

with:
Kramer – Electric guitar, keyboards, tapes (tracks 3, 7, 11)
Masaki Batoh – Acoustic guitar (tracks 1, 6, 10, 13)
Kazuo Ogino – Keyboards (tracks 1, 6, 10, 13)
Michio Kurihara – Electric guitar (tracks 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15)

All tracks recorded at Kali Studios and produced by Damon & Naomi
except 1, 6, 10, 13 produced by Damon & Naomi with Masaki Batoh
and 3, 7, 11 recorded at Noise New Jersey and produced by Kramer

The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi originally released 1995 (Sub Pop 322)
Playback Singers originally released 1998 (Sub Pop 425)
Damon & Naomi with Ghost originally released 2000 (Sub Pop 501)
Song to the Siren: Live in San Sebastian originally released 2002 (Sub Pop 592)

Remastered by Alan Douches at West West Side Music

On DAMON & NAOMI’S SUB POP ALBUMS:

THE WONDROUS WORLD OF DAMON & NAOMI
“After my last shows in the 70's, I became a Music Celibate for almost 20 years. In 1996 my son Dave gave me this CD. I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world, with songs I really needed to learn how to play. Damon & Naomi found ten ways of talking about sadness without being sad-a wondrous and necessary achievement.”
-- Tom Rapp (Pearls Before Swine)

PLAYBACK SINGERS
“I sat beside Damon and Naomi at a screening of the classic underground drag movie Flaming Creatures, which is very beautiful and very, very slow. As most of the audience gradually trickled out or fell asleep, Damon and Naomi got more intrigued, till by the end of the event-free film they wore beatific smiles. Soon afterward, they started their book-publishing company, Exact Change, which published Kafka ephemera and John R. Stilgoe's Shallow-Water Dictionary, a paean to marshes and estuaries.

"So, years before hearing their music, I could visualize exactly what they were going to sound like: like Kafka, Kafka père and Josef K in drag, pulling a rowboat slowly and quietly through chartreuse reeds in the gray dawn. Not unlike their previous band, Galaxie 500.

"On Playback Singers (Sub Pop), recorded at home on digital eight-track, Naomi brings breathy singing to new plateaus, and Damon sings much like Neil Young slowed down. A few guitars, mostly acoustic, a little harmonium, noodling bass and occasional light percussion fill in the long pauses between such languidly intoned phrases as 'It's so hard being me.' The undemanding lyrics are vague and filled with water, shadows, reflections and air. Those who think Nick Drake was a speed freak will love it, and those who like to fall asleep to music will never hear the last song, Tom Rapp's lovely 'Translucent Carriages.'

"In concert, Damon and Naomi perform unaccompanied, sounding even more bare than their records and just as languorous. They are probably the quietest rock group in the United States."
— Stephin Merritt (The Magnetic Fields)

DAMON & NAOMI WITH GHOST
“If the soaring arc of Damon and Naomi's melodies intersecting with Ghost's earthly meditations doesn't bring a tear to your eye, there's a chance you are already dead. This is mountain-peak listening par excellence.”
-- Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance)

 “PS - And I don't consider the mountain-peak comment hyperbolic. I have actually listened to this record on a mountain-peak!”

SONG TO THE SIREN: LIVE IN SAN SEBASTIAN
“One afternoon when we were 17 or 18, we went round to a friend’s house, and he played us ‘This Car Climbed Mount Washington’ by a new band called Damon & Naomi. A tough kid from the school burst into tears. It was an extraordinary moment; here was music capable of taming brute beasts, and here was also all the promise and strange, distant loveliness of Galaxie 500 reborn into something new.

 “In the late 1990s, we heard they were coming to London. My band sent out carefully worded announcements that we were available as openers, forgetting in our excitement that we had yet to release any records, and that no one had ever heard of us. We wore the promoter down over the next two years though, and we finally got to play with Damon & Naomi in a small club in Wolverhampton in 2001, nervously tuning up and smoking cigarettes before taking the stage.

 “After that we played together whenever we could, whether New York, Boston or London, in fact anywhere but Wolverhampton.  Damon does not have a youthful voice, or an indie voice – he has an ageless voice, full of beautiful weariness, a gipsy voice. Naomi’s eerie, counter-intuitive accompaniments and Kurihara’s electric guitar mesh behind it perfectly. This recording captures their live sound, which I remember most clearly from Wolverhampton, sitting at a table in a town in the middle of nowhere, too delighted to even take notes."
-- Alasdair Maclean (The Clientele)