San Jose’s sonic cure-all for the Y2K hangover that never materialized, Duster emerged from a cloud of lonely bong rips to take indie rock to the moon, and beyond. Scotch-taped guitars toggle between a chorus of brittle winter trees and a blanket of distorted fuzz. The low rumble of a cardboard box being kicked in a dead mall keeps pace in the background, as muffled, sung-spoken vocals ponder the great mysteries of modern mundanity. Three years of home recording accidents and blown-out 2AM studio experiments are spread across four LPs or three CDs, gathering the short-lived trio’s Stratosphere and Contemporary Movement albums, 1975 EP, singles, demos, and other miscellaneous debris into one escape pod, now free to drift in the endless void of space.

Mastered from a mix of crusty cassettes, decaying DATs, and warbly analog tape, Capsule Losing Contact is housed in a rusted slipcase with all four albums secured in heavy weight tip-on jackets. An accompanying lyric book guides the listener through Duster’s lo-fi worldview, adorned with the last gasps of an expired golden age as captured on Polaroid and disposable Kodak cameras.


1 LP1: Moon Age
2 Heading for the Door
3 Gold Dust
4 Topical Solution
5 Docking the Pod
6 The Landing
7 Echo, Bravo
8 Constellations
9 The Queen of Hearts
10 Two Way Radio
11 Inside Out
12 Stratosphere
13 Reed to Hillsborough
14 Shadows of Planes
15 Earth Moon Transit
16 The Twins / Romantica
17 Sideria LP2: Get the Dutch
18 Operations
19 Diamond
20 Me and the Birds
21 Travelogue
22 The Phantom Facing Me
23 Cooking
24 Unrecovery
25 The Breakup Suite
26 Everything You See (Is Your Own)
27 Now It's Coming Back
28 Auto-Mobile LP3: Orbitron
29 Fuzz and Timbre
30 My Friends Are Cosmonauts
31 Closer to the Speed of Sound
32 Stars Will Fall
33 Four Hours
34 Light Years
35 Capsule Losing Contact
36 East Reed
37 And Things Are Mostly Ghosts (Version Over Dose Mix)
38 Irato
39 Memphis Sophisticate
40 The Motion Picture
41 And Things (Are Mostly Ghosts)
42 August Relativity
43 Want No Light to Shine
44 Haunt My Sleep
45 Peyote
46 Something That I Need
47 What You're Doing to Me
48 Faint
49 The Hours