CatchLight Recordings Artist: Dora Flood
Dora Flood:: Scott Anderson, Stephen Cavoretto, David Alexander, Michael Padilla, & Sean Degaetano (Glasgow c. 1995, photo by Derek Davis)
The members of Dora Flood began making music together in 1990. First going by Bliss, then Belladonna, the San Franciscan quintet changed its name but not its inimitable homage to classic British pop and psychedelic rock. Forging an original voice of their own, Dora Flood became a fixture of SF’s early shoegaze scene, joining fellow local bands like The Rosemarys, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Orange, Your Precious You, and Ozean in pioneering the Bay Area’s singular, ardent transfigurations of the dreamgaze sound. After several years of nonstop performances, practices, and sessions at cafes, bars, warehouses, studios, garages, and even rooftops around the city, Dora Flood released their first studio album, an EP named 1301, on American Standard Recordings in 1995.
The 1301 EP was named after 1301 Leavenworth Street, a fog-decayed building in SF where all five members of Dora Flood lived at the time. 1301 was a ramshackle apartment complex full of colorful degenerates, young rockers, and every imaginable breed of the mentally ill, artists and other such riffraff. A resident cowboy queen, music blasting from every cramped quarter, cat lady strippers, impounded vehicles, clackity stove clocks, clawfoot tubs breaking through the floor, and no sleep ever made the residence and its world feel visceral, mythological, and always equally real and surreal. It was within this psychedelic hive that Dora Flood gave birth to the sprawling empyrean and earnestly unique sound you hear here on their debut release.
One of the most ambitious and transcendental extended play albums of the genre and its era, 1301 marks one of the most essential and most brash musical statements of the early 90’s. We at CatchLight Recordings are honored to be sharing it for the first time ever on vinyl. As an added bonus, side two of this reissue features five additional songs from the 1301 era that the band recently excavated from their archives. All five have never been released before (not even across the six albums Dora Flood subsequently produced over the next 13 years of their storied two decade run). These outtakes deepen our appreciation for the key role Dora Flood played in establishing and advancing a new generation of psychedelic and shoegaze music across the Bay Area and America’s shores.