Biography
Essentially an alter ego for the New York avant-pop ensemble Mercury Rev, Harmony Rockets featured the same central musicians, above all vocalist and guitarist Jonathan Donahue together with lead guitarist Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiak, who used the alias to explore a deeper psychedelic direction. The project gave them license to chase their most obscure sonic concepts without restraint, blending ambient textures, industrial pulses, and fractured noise into an all-encompassing study of space, distortion, and melodic disorder. Their debut, the 1995 album Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void, appeared in the interval separating Mercury Rev’s See You on the Other Side, also from 1995, and the 1998 release Deserter’s Songs; it consisted of one continuous 42-minute ambient noise composition that captured the unit at its most uncompromisingly experimental. The 1997 follow-up, Golden Ticket EP, reversed course by delivering a disco reinterpretation of a number from the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, originally written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse, alongside their own reading of Vangelis Pappathanisou’s “L’Apocalypse Des Animaux.”
Following the acclaim that greeted Deserter’s Songs, Harmony Rockets remained inactive for fifteen years, convening only sporadically for studio experiments. In 2012 the group reconvened for concert engagements across Western Europe and the United States, yielding two full-length improvisations drawn from performances in Oslo and New York City that surfaced as digital releases on Excelsior Productions under the titles Angels Are Spirits, Flames of Fire and The Crawling Journey of the Serpents Starry Night. During 2018 Harmony Rockets joined forces with longtime Woodstock neighbor and acoustic guitar figure Peter Walker along with associates that included Nels Cline of Wilco, former Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, and bassist and instrument maker Martin Keith; the sessions produced three extended improvisations that Tompkins Square issued as the album Lachesis/Clotho/Atropos, credited jointly to the ensemble and Walker.
Following the acclaim that greeted Deserter’s Songs, Harmony Rockets remained inactive for fifteen years, convening only sporadically for studio experiments. In 2012 the group reconvened for concert engagements across Western Europe and the United States, yielding two full-length improvisations drawn from performances in Oslo and New York City that surfaced as digital releases on Excelsior Productions under the titles Angels Are Spirits, Flames of Fire and The Crawling Journey of the Serpents Starry Night. During 2018 Harmony Rockets joined forces with longtime Woodstock neighbor and acoustic guitar figure Peter Walker along with associates that included Nels Cline of Wilco, former Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, and bassist and instrument maker Martin Keith; the sessions produced three extended improvisations that Tompkins Square issued as the album Lachesis/Clotho/Atropos, credited jointly to the ensemble and Walker.
Albums
Live