#12 excerpted from “THE GET QUICK FILES: CHOOSE YOUR OWN CONJECTURE” as remembered by Mark Question
THE HALCYON FRACTURE
2016 - 2019
It was an orchestrupture — slowmocean, reversonic, subaquathunder — a bang unwound like a rosary dropped in reverse baptism. The Get Quick: re-formed, reformatted. They foldformed the very form into a paperplaneplan, origamire of origin, and flang it skywise at a dead-channel firmament, that cathodic firmagloom flickerfield where angels static-speak in pixelpsalms.
This was the Halcyfracture — calmquake, kingfisher fissure — when the timestreams unzipped their trousers and leaked into one another’s pockets. Chronologies went cross-eyed. Pastpresents forefutured. And the band, now mythtick, split-spooled, spiralling into coexisting co-quickening selves — TGQ∞, the Quick and the Never.
MULTIPLICITIES? O yesyes.
There was the Neos Get Quick — São Paulosophy-bright — pop-upping in galleried garages, synthmodulating with hospitalcast-offs, heartmonitors turned rhythmorgans, defibrillating disco into the art-centric arteries of Avenida Paulista. They played pulse-checks for the postmodern.
Another, the Dirtjazz Get Quick, Mediterranean-erranean, salt-occult, crooned through rusthorns and reel-to-reel reliquaries, tapehiss like incense. They were cantors of the cracked cathedral, scad saints of the sidelong scale.
And the Gaast Quick — unconfirmamented — only earsighted when feedbackloops grew haunted, bursting into gooped gittanies: “Vapour Tangle,” “Guilt Milk Radio,” glitchgospels stuttering in the circuitry of suburbmornings. Toaster apparitions. Alexa exorcisms.
Releases? Mirrorlabels, mirracles. Companies that existed preposteriori, born on release-day and gone by the morrow. Phantomimprints.
Drink the Halcyon (Two-Thousand-and-Sixteenish): glamfolklorica fractopera, rumored to embed binauracles — left-ear lures, right-ear rites — whispered commands in the interaural cathedral.
Shimmertrap Exegesis (Eighteen-teen): albumwikiARGonautica; lyrics buried in defunct telnet catacombs, BBS ossuaries, modem-chants wheezing like asthmatic prophets. Fans as archaeolistenerists.
Asymmetrical Companion Animal (Twenty-twenty): the dissolu-record, ambient amniotics, muffled mouthings, datamosh mosaics, glitchlullabies for the end of certitude.
THE TRIO RE-CONVENES (convenered?):
Mitchell Joy, exiled to the Free Maritime Zonation — salt-sovereign, flagless and fluvial — returned in Plague Nurse vestments, pamphleteering curewound doctrine: “The Music is Cure and Wound.” His drum patterns crisped — bone-saw clean, surgical swing, antiseptempo. Steri-groove.
Erjk Vanderwolf grew unreadable as palimpsest. Hair haloed, robe phosphorescent, voice a haunted chromeyellow hum. He ab-architectured the guitar, left structure structurless, played field-recordings filtered through memory’s unreliable narratorator. Autobiograffiti in feedback.
Colonel Boran — bless the madbastardius — lectured under alias-alibis in artcollegiums, Esperanting of fractalnoise, Pythagorastuning, and the black god in the delaypedal. “Deus in mora,” he muttered, echoing eternity.
EVENTUALITIES (probabilimyths):
The CERN Sonolysis of Seventeen: particlecollisions slowed to bootleg tremolations; quarkquavers resembling early Quick demos, hadron harmonies humming “B-Side Bombs” in the collider’s choir.
The Midnight Two-Thirty-Seven (Eighteen): a global auricularity; fans reported the same song at local 2:37 — through phones, TVs, radios, dreambuffers, and one piscine witness, a talkative carp of conspirasea. Timezones time-zoned.
The Vanderwolf Reversal (Nineteen): forty minutes in Tokyodrome discoursing on time-signatures (signa-times), then a gig entirely backmasked live, de-unwriting “She’s Made of Helicopters” until it became “She’s Unmade of Heliocopters,” helios dismembered from copterus. Song unsung itself.
LYRICS DARKEN, CODICES QUICKEN:
Reddit rabbitholes and gradschool glossolalias declared Erjk no longer cryptic but proph-rock-tic. Lines as tarotsonic arcana. One obsessivist inscribed:
“The nurse places the needle in where the note used to be” —
and so titled a documentarycument banned in seven nations, septem-censored.
By Twenty-Twenty the Quick toured not yet everywhere saw them. Hologramila in Manila. Drone-swarm Berlin where no bandband stood. A New York subwaycar rumoured to sing only when empty — vacuumvocalism in the undercity.
No longer tourers. Barely broadcasters.
Now a presense. A felt-more-than-heardness.
A signal beneath the signal.
Some say dormancy. Others deepancy — into the signal-well, the dreambuffer, the musick under music, where note becomes needle and groove becomes grave.
As for me? I keep Shimmertrap on cassette in the glovecompartment — tape hiss as talisman — and drive slow through electromagtempests, hoping for a whisperquark in the static.
And the sky remains, cathodead, a television tuned to nowhere —
snowfalling, ever white, ever waiting.