They performed and recorded continuously from 1996 to 2003, and collaborated extensively with experimental music artists such as DJ Spooky and Elliott Sharp, and avant-garde videographer Mark McNamara.

FEQ began as a house band for a series of warehouse parties on 125th Street in New York City, famously playing their first gig in a freight elevator.

Their second and subsequent records saw the gradual expansion of their instrumentation (starting with Feuer doubling on keyboards and DuBois playing guitars) until by the time of their break-up in 2003 the entire band was effectively composed of multi-instrumentalists.

In their liner notes, they referred to themselves as a group of musicians in the present imagining the past imaging the future, a concept akin to the literary conceit of Steampunk; by combining cutting-edge digital (computers, samplers), obsolescent solid state (analog synthesizers), classical 18th century (cello), and aboriginal (didjeridoo) instrumentation, the group deliberately confused the temporal reference point of their music.

Stylistically FEQ was known to appropriate whatever genres they felt like, working to fuse different styles of breakbeat, drum and bass, downtempo, digital hardcore, rock, hip hop, classical, and, most conspicuously, academic computer music.