Bad Poetry Club is a newfangled reimagining of music’s most pristine moments, slipping effortlessly through a polymerization of smooth jazz flares, old-school hip hop tendencies, embossed beatbox aptitude, and the modern dance juxtaposition of forceful breakbeat production against authentic, urban-illuminated brass punctuation. From the corroborative minds of Michael Wilbur (Moon Hooch instrumentalist), Tonio Sagan (producer, lyricist), Honeycomb (beatboxer, producer), and Sotorios (Political Animals frontman), comes an unfaltering, and successful, attempt to capture what previously seemed forgotten relics of musical introspection. 

Serving as carried support throughout a stifling Moon Hooch fall-winter tour (2016), the notorious New England beatbox icon, Gable Johnson- a.k.a.Honeycomb- brought lifelong friend and frequent collaborator, Tonio Sagan (grandson of the late Carl Sagan), along for the pleasantries, during which the two promptly discovered a further cohesion within Wilbur, Moon Hooch’s tenor saxophonist. With a sprawling conglomerate of tour dates still ahead, the newly acquainted trio began a thorough investigation of the newfound chemistry within the live setting. The point at which this live, improvised effort transitioned from mad-musical experiment to its current, distinguished form as the Bad Poetry Club, is masked in uncertainty even to its own constituents.

 

After a cliche cycle of bittersweet goodbyes and voiced gratitude, the “club” reached its moment of dispersion. Returning home, each poet soon discovered that despite a teeming work schedule, it was a perturbing sense of vacancy, an almost cinematically-fantastical remorse, which prevailed. It did not take long for the ostensibly diverse musical pioneers to implement an effective creative process through which to funnel its multifarious creations.

Indulging wholly in this unwavering disregard for the hurdles of long-distance collaboration, the Bad Poetry Club only further heightened the stakes through an invitation to Connecticut emcee Sotorios, offering him a temporary entrance and potential residual place among its ranks. Unwilling to accept a guest membership, Sotorios swiftly demonstrated the unfathomable depths of his lyrical excursions, matched only by an equally polished control of vocal rhythm. Another member strong, the now quartet dove mercilessly into its abrasive, yet agonizingly irrefutable, criticisms of just about anything and everything in need of elucidation. Despite four vastly divergent cerebral sources, the very same, distinct unison existing between the Bad Poetry Club's members inadvertently expelled its very self in the unyielding audio format of the group’s eponymous debut record.