Mike Baggetta - Stephen Hodges - Mike Watt

mssv recently completed their Haru Tour 2022 playing 48 shows in 48 days all across the US! Lots of fun was had bringing the music to everybody finally after the 2020 tour postponement. In addition to performing music from their self-titled studio album and the music from the lockdown 7 inch releases, all new music that was worked out on tour was recorded at BIG EGO Studios in Long Beach, CA right after and will be released in 2023 as the next mssv full length record.

Our 1st special edition 7" release, recorded completely in lockdown isolation, on the Italian Improved Sequence label came out in September 2020 and is available now from the label directly. 

Our 2nd special edition 7" release, recorded completely in lockdown isolation, is The Scott Aicher EP - a very special 4 song micro-opera based on new original artwork by Scott Aicher, included in the packaging, and features Petra Haden joining us on violin and voice. This is out now on Nomad Eel Records, available at our new Bandcamp page, or by scrolling down to the bottom of this site.

Our 3rd special edition 7" release, also recorded in lockdown, is out now on Striped Light Records. mssv Meets Nels Cline is a collaboration between mssv and guitarist Nels Cline featuring one song by Nels and one song by mssv guitarist Mike Baggetta. Comes with handmade packaging and handset letterpress design by Bryan Baker of Stukenborg Press, as well as an assortment of special prints with text (poems?) from one of the members of the band. Which print will you get? No one knows!

You can check out all of our upcoming releases on our new Bandcamp page, or by scrolling down to the bottom of this site.

Premier Guitar writes about mssv and their guitarist Mike Baggetta

Brooklyn Vegan writes about mssv's POSTPONED Haru Tour 2020 around Big Ears Festival

Rock and Roll Globe premieres videos of Mike Watt's Liberty Calls! & No One Says Old Man (To The Old Man) from mssv's Live Flowers album out Dec. 1

JazzTimes Magazine premieres "The Pink Room" from mssv's Live Flowers album out Dec. 1

No less an authority than Nels Cline, the high priest of art-rock guitarists, has called Knoxville’s Mike Baggetta a “guitar poet.” That poetry, alternately gnarled and flowing, is on fine display in Main Steam Stop Valve, the second album by (and the decompressed namesake of) mssv, an experimental rock trio featuring Baggetta, the legendary punk bassist Mike Watt, and the versatile drummer Stephen Hodges.  

The collaboration began when Watt, of The Minutemen fame, joined Baggetta and seasoned session drummer Jim Keltner to record an improvised jazz-rock album called Wall of Flowers, an eight-track romp from pastoral splendor to urban din and back again. When Keltner declined to tour, they brought in Hodges, whose credits as a player include Mavis Staples, Tom Waits, and David Lynch, not to mention Contemplating the Engine Room with Watt.  

Solidified as mssv—some heretofore unimagined hybrid of a punky power trio and a dreamy experimental rock band—they released Main Steam Stop Valve, which blends industrial vigor and impressionistic languor into a lingering impression of “pressure, combustion, power, and hissing clouds of sonic poetry,” as Premier Guitar said. From the throttled surf guitar of “The Mystery Of” and the glimmering post-rock of “Every Growing Thing” to groovy, songful numbers like “Old Crow,” there’s no telling which way the band will turn at any given moment, a proposition that becomes a promise when they break down and reassemble these songs live, with an instinct for restraint and an openness to anarchy.