Biography
A poetry-music duo from Chicago that were together from 1983 to 1993.
Lydia Tomkiw (August 6, 1959 – September 4, 2007) was an American poet, singer, and songwriter, best known for her work with the new wave musical group Algebra Suicide, along with her husband Don Hedeker.
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In the fall of 1982, at a reading at Columbia Squires, Hedeker publicly accompanied Tomkiw's poetry for the first time. It was a rudimentary setup, with Hedeker providing minimally amplified washes of sound on a somewhat glitchy Vox Guitar Organ. This experiment soon coalesced into an actual band. Their name, Algebra Suicide, came from a line in the poem "Recalling the Last Encounter." It was, from the very beginning, envisioned as a vehicle for Tomkiw's poetry; Hedeker's intention was to bring interesting accents and color to the poems themselves.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.