We're just over 5 years strong with our ​Karate campaign and still not through the full archives. Six LP reissues, two seven-inches, two boxsets, a reunion album and a nine-CD complete collection later, and it feels like we’re still familiarizing ourselves with how the band's expansive catalog came to be.

Geoff Farina’s Southern Records tenure was not just about Karate. His late-90s guitar-and-vocal solo output included the bedroom-recorded Usonian Dream Sequence that echoed The Secret Stars’ intimate lo-fi sentiments, Reverse Eclipse that rode the more delicate fringes of Unsolved-era Karate, and the single Steely Dan, a paean to a contemporaneous guilty pleasure. FFF collects all three long-out-of-print releases here on vinyl for the first time, fastidiously packaged and punctuated with Farina’s written reflections on their making.

Geoff Farina: Excerpt On Solo:
"I’m not sure what prompted me to 'go solo' in the late 1990s, but it certainly wasn’t any dissatisfaction with my band. Usonian Dream Sequence and Karate’s The Bed Is In The Ocean were both released in 1998, Reverse Eclipse and Karate’s Unsolved were both released in 2000, and that period was one of Karate’s most active and fulfilling.
My deadpan voice and narrow vocal range have always precluded me from becoming much of a 'singer songwriter,' although my first guitar was an acoustic, and I’d been aping Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen songs since ninth grade. By the late 90s, Karate had been noticed by small-venue promoters both here and in Europe, and since my only other employment at the time consisted of TA-ing at UMass Boston and sporadic bar-back shifts at the Middle East Café, recording and touring solo between Karate tours seemed like a logical next step.
I recorded Usonian in my bedroom of the Franklin Street apartment that I shared—at different times—with Jeff Goddard, Vanessa Downing, Jon Manders, Alissa Cardone, Susan Gray, and Sara Lorimar. I vividly remember recording late into the night on the small-reel Teac 4-track that I still own. Jeff Goddard, who had to rise early for his day job printing T-shirts at Mirror Image, complained only once. I'm sure I kept him up many more nights, and he soon relocated to an apartment across the street with friends Clark Marty and Tammy Bonn. Around the same time, Gavin McCarthy, Mahmood Shaikh, Dean Taormina, and Nick Hudben occupied an apartment above a ball bearing factory at the top of Franklin Street where Karate would rehearse for many more years.
If Karate's 2000 Unsolved leveraged our jazz fetish into a unique flavor of indie rock with any degree of subtlety, my 2000 solo CD Reverse Eclipse wore lounge jazz and beat poetry on its sleeve. Most of the lyrics from the album were generated during a period of daily "automatic writing," the Surrealist practice of putting pen to paper in a manner that outpaces conscious editing. I remember filling endless pages with freelyassociated text during Karate tours, and I still occasionally turn to automatic writing to generate raw material for song lyrics. Songs like "Gravity" are full of exquisite corpse like passages of unexpected contrast, and at its best, I hope the vocal achieves the Leonard Cohen-like quality of sounding read rather than sung. The unnaturalness of this formula, the Tin Pan Alley harmony, and the fusion-era lead guitar would not have survived the scrutiny of my Karate bandmates, but here, you have it, ironyfree. To my ear, the more properly indiefolk songs like "Fire" and "The Left-handed Way" have better survived the test of time, along with some refreshing moments of Stratocaster improvisation by Josh Larue.
-Geoff Farina, 2026