Effective period / Period of releases: 1994

Members: Scott Ziegler, Steve Anderson (3), Phil Smoot, Sam Goldman, Bruce Todd

Dingle's idiot-savant approach to making music is far more effective than one might hypothesize; over a surprisingly consistent series of tracks, the San Francisco collective arranges kooky instrumentation, off-key singing, and a general tendency toward what might be called "zaniness" into fairly straightforward (although exceedingly wacky) pop music. Of course, this approach has been attempted by countless projects, with results ranging from decently clever to frightfully irritating. Dingle, somehow, musters enough charm to lie on the better end of this spectrum.