In the ‘80s, F/i was so underground that even their founder, Richard Franecki, didn’t have copies of their earliest albums. “I don’t really count those in our discography, since they were privately issued under our fake ‘Uddersounds’ label,” he has said. The group eventually found modest success — a series of albums on the much-respected noise label RRRecords, European tours, shows with Hawkwind and Acid Mothers Temple — but in those early days, F/i recorded cassettes to trade rather than sell, swapping single copies for material from like-minded bands. 1985’s Invisible Men is the holy grail of this era, a tape so rare that they didn’t even bother releasing it on a fake label.
Franecki came up through Milwaukee’s tiny punk scene in the late ‘70s, playing in bands…