Voyager One
w/Poseur, Saeta, Wonderful
Sat Nov 30, Sit & Spin, $6.

The late, great astral-jazz pioneer Sun Ra said, "Space is the place," but most musicians have ignored him or found the prospect too daunting. Space rock--whose most famous roots can be found in Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd and Hawkwind's early-'70s output--has waxed and waned over the years, never really denting the mainstream, but frequently blazing across the underground firmament.

Seattle's recent contributors to the space-rock canon include Kinski and their pals Voyager One, a quartet who just dropped a star-dusted gem on Loveless Records called Monster Zero. With punk, metal, and variants thereof still dominating the rock landscape, it's a relief to find bands like Voyager One striving to launch you out of the mundane plane to more transcendent realms. It doesn't take much arm-twisting to get Voyager One guitarist Jeramy Koepping to admit a fondness for the psychedelic lifestyle.

"Everybody [in the group] has different [influences], but one commonality is psychedelic music," Koepping concedes via e-mail while on a West Coast tour. "Lots of people call us shoegazer, and yeah, we like that stuff a lot, but we also like music from Germany in the '60s, and where would I be without the Velvet Underground or really spooky doo-wop or Phil Spector? Most everyone in the band also loves dub a whole lot."

Listeners may also hear traces of Echo & the Bunnymen, the Verve, and Ride in VO's sonic storms. The guys in Voyager One (which also includes guitarist/vocalist Peter Marchese, bassist Cody Burns, and drummer Tony Zuniga) are serious music fans, but they're not interested in replicating their record collections. "We never want to ape anybody," Koepping states, "so how do we take Phil Spector's use of reverb and add that to King Tubby's use of delay, a pinch of Neu!'s drone, and some early Verve swagger? [From there], boom, the next song shows up."

Powered by a new rhythm section, Monster Zero finds the group soaring deeper into the stratosphere than where their debut, 2000's From the New Nation of Long Shadows, took them. "[Nation] was more rock, lots of midtempo/slow [songs], and was recorded pretty traditionally (13 days, watching the clock, working with an engineer we just met)," Koepping explains. With the band's access to Park Studios in the Kirkland Teen Union Building where Koepping works, VO had more time to experiment and hone their songs without keeping track of time.

Seattle, for its part, has supported VO from the get-go. "We have been very fortunate. Radio has been kind--long before our relationship with [Loveless boss and KEXP DJ John] Richards. And people come to our shows, buy our records, and tell us we are good, mostly." With Voyager One currently resting at No. 9 on KEXP's charts, though, some could infer a conflict of interest. "We were getting played on KEXP long before Richards [began working there]. Cheryl Waters was the first [DJ] to help us out. But, yeah, they have been playing the hell out of our record and we love them for it. Don Yates is the music director there, and as I understand it, he decides what gets added. There are plenty of Loveless bands that don't get play. This city and its smallish size lend themselves to walking a conflict-of-interest tightrope. For example, there are several musicians at The Stranger whose bands I read about all the time. It boils down to this: We made a pretty good record that deserves to be played on the radio. If it didn't get played, we would be punished for being on a label."

Granted, in this conservative musical climate, any help a band like Voyager One can get is welcome. Where does Koepping see VO fitting in the current scene? "If a band like Radiohead can have the No. 1 record in the U.S., even if for only one week, then anything is possible here. We are better suited musically for U.K. audiences and are moving in that direction, but we are American, and certainly don't feel like giving up on American audiences. We play shows all the time where people say, 'I have never heard anything like that before! I love it!' We aren't reinventing the wheel, so it is nice to open people up to new sounds that may end up being important to them. But the American musical infrastructure isn't really geared up to support sounds like ours. It just makes it harder, not impossible."