Biographical
Poem Rocket (More/Less), ca. 1999
Photo: Anastacia Maggioncalda
Art-noise-indie genre-defiers Poem Rocket are back.
Formed in NYC c. 1992, Poem Rocket was unsung yet critically adored with releases on indie labels like Bear, PCP, Magic Eye, Carcrashh, and Chicago’s avant jazz and rock label Atavistic. Somewhere in the 00s, band members fragmented into overlapping amniotic dimensions of poetry, visual poetry, film, and other approaches to media and performance. But now, reconvening around a “lost” EP on Silver Girl Records, Poem Rocket is gathering the dark matter hanging from massive filaments stretching across the universe. The aim? To stitch the wormholes from other peripheral universes together, to reconcile the future of fate and desire, to boldly transgress the formal stochastic limits of noise-rock, psych-rock, art-rock, and experimentation with semantic umph and spiritualist transcendence. Holy fuck, that’s a tall order.
But Poem Rocket has always pursued tall orders as reflected in their interests across a wide conceptual spectrum.
These include computer programming, UFOs, Native American mythology, art, literature, cities, the cosmos itself, history, and space travel by car ... and so on. Their album Infinite Retry on Parallel Time-Out is taken from a now ancient PC’s error message. Another album, psychogeography, explores the concept of cities via Situationist conceptions of "psychogeography,” what Guy Debord defined as "the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.” And both the double-CD Invasion! and the new recording—the once “lost” Lend-Lease EP—explore the tidal currents of the historical past and the utopian future. With or without an awareness of these references, Poem Rocket lyrics are a mix of poetic, philosophical, and spiritual invocations and incantations. And their aesthetic is definitively post-punk, but which wave?
In this way, Poem Rocket has always drawn from deeper, timeless wells of imagination, inspiration, and energy.
Live performances often begin with softer acoustic songs performed without microphones at the edge of the stage or in the audience, only to increase in volume and emotional intensity. These wild performances are periodically characterized by strange happenings brought on by the ritualistic breakdown of the stage-audience barrier. On certain occasions, band members disappeared from the stage and strange lights would suddenly come on—or inexplicably go out.
Such are the musical, lyrical, performative, and often immeasurable elements of a band that has always defied classification.
And in a genre-obsessed culture drained of difference by algorithms of sameness, it almost makes sense—almost!—that Poem Rocket is still so unsung. The evidence? Upon the release of 2007′s Invasion!, a New York City DJ on WFMU’s airwaves reportedly said, “These guys [Poem Rocket] would have been big in another universe.” Have not older Poem Rocket recordings been detected on places like Last.fm while more recent recordings have infiltrated the usual DSP suspects? Note too that according to the latest in spectroscopy and cosmology, this universe—the one you're reading this bio in—is still expanding. So holy fucking Hugh Everett! Via the potential of expansion and congruence, that WFMU DJ’s alleged "would-have-been” other “universe" is already interpenetrating this one. Astrophysical instruments of measure have already detected the cosmic merger in locales adjacent to where you are right now.