The Muffins are largely an instrumental band inspired and influenced by avant-garde jazz, progressive rock, 20th-century music, and the English Canterbury scene.
[1][5][6] They work in an "underground genre" Perfect Sound Forever called "the avant-garde side of latter-day US progressive jazz-rock", and place "the joy of creation over commercial concerns".
[1] The Rolling Stone Record Guide called them the "spiritual American cousins of Henry Cow and Soft Machine",[7] and AllMusic described their music as a "unique blend of Canterbury progressive, fusion, improvisation and much more.
"[2] In 1973, keyboardist and saxophonist Dave Newhouse, guitarist Michael Zentner and bassist Billy Swann, disillusioned with the state of American rock music at the time, decided to form their own group.
[1] They moved into a large farmhouse in Gaithersburg, Maryland they called the Buba Flirf house,[nb 1] and turned for inspiration to a new "Canterbury" style of music (Soft Machine, Caravan and others) that was coming out of England at the time.
[8] In late 1976 they found an "adventurous" drummer Paul Sears, who not only relieved the other members from shared percussion duties, but also, according to Scott, "open[ed] the Muffins up.
Newhouse went on a European tour with Frith's new band Skeleton Crew as well as begin a second career as a school teacher, and Scott ran a recording studio.
[8] Cuneiform Records had already re-issued all their old albums on CDs, and released a collection of unreleased tracks on Open City, and their early studio and home demos on Chronometers.
[9] In April 2016, Sears announced that "the Muffins are no more", having played their final performance at Orion Sound Studios in mid-May 2015, for the filming of the Romantic Warriors III: Canterbury Tales documentary.