#12 excerpted from “THE GET QUICK FILES: CHOOSE YOUR OWN CONJECTURE” as remembered by Mark Question 

THE HALCYON FRACTURE
2016 - 2019

It was an orchestrated eruption — in slow motion, in reverse, underwater. The Get Quick didn’t return to form. They folded form in on itself and launched it aloft like an origami drone against a sky like a TV tuned to a dead channel. This was the Halcyon Fracture: a period where all timelines began leaking into one another and the band, now fully mythic, seemed to split and spiral off into multiple coexisting versions.

MULTIPLE TGQs (really?):

Well, there was one TGQ — the neon one — was playing pop-up art gallery gigs in São Paulo, using modular synths made from discarded hospital equipment.

Another, the dirty jazz one, was doing unannounced sets at Mediterranean occult festivals, crooning through rusted horns and cracked reel-to-reels.

And the ghost TGQ, unconfirmed, was only heard by accident — when smartphones malfunctioned or smart speakers suddenly burst into fractured audio loops and sang fragments of “Vapour Tangle” or “Guilt Milk Radio.”

Most official releases came through mirror labels — companies that may not have existed before the release date and disappeared afterward. Albums like:

Drink The Halcyon (2016): a fractured glam-folk opera rumored to contain embedded binaural commands.

Shimmertrap Exegesis (2018): part album, part wiki, part longform ARG where fans received lyrics hidden in long-defunct telnet BBS servers.

Asymmetrical Companion Animal (2020): the so-called “dissolution record,” featuring just ambient textures, muffled speech, and longform data moshing.

THE TRIO RECONVENES (sort of):

Mitchell Joy, back from his self-imposed exile in the Free Maritime Zone, was now performing in full Plague Nurse regalia, dispensing home-printed pamphlets titled “The Music is Cure and Wound.” His drum patterns got cleaner, but only in the way a bone-saw can be clean.

Erjk Vanderwolf became more and more unreadable — flowing hair, glowing robe, voice the tone of haunted chrome yellow. His guitar work abandoned structure entirely, eschewed architecture, playing only ambient field recordings filtered through the memories of an unreliable narrator.

Col. Boran — bless the mad bastard — was spotted giving lectures at art colleges under assumed names, speaking in Esperanto about fractal noise, ancient tuning systems, and the black god in the delay pedal.

KEY EVENTS (maybe):

The CERN Audio Leak of 2017, where data visualizations of particle collisions, when slowed and filtered, eerily resembled early Get Quick bootlegs.

The 2018 Midnight Broadcast: a global event where hundreds of fans reported hearing the same TGQ song at 2:37 AM local time — through phones, TVs, radios, dreams, and one reported talking fish.

The 2019 Vanderwolf Reversal: Erjk gave a 40-minute lecture in Tokyo on time signatures, then played a gig where the band performed their entire set backwards, culminating in the de-unwriting of a song called “She’s Made of Helicopters.”

THE LYRICS GET DARKER:

It’s during this phase that the codex theory gains mainstream traction. Reddit threads and graduate papers alike claim that Erjk’s lyrics are no longer cryptic but prophetic. Some are said to predict world events, others map out a “sonic tarot,” while one obsessively catalogued line —

“The nurse places the needle in where the note used to be”


— became the title of an underground cult documentary banned in seven countries.

By 2020, The Get Quick weren’t even touring. But somehow, everyone had seen them. A pop-up hologram show in Manila. A drone swarm performance in Berlin where no band was present. And in New York, a rumored subway car that only played their songs when empty.

No longer a touring rock group. Barely a broadcast.


Now? A presence. Felt more than heard.

Some say they went dormant again in late 2020.


Others say they’ve just gone deeper — into the signal well, into the dream buffer, into the music beneath the music.

Me? I just keep a copy of Shimmertrap on cassette in the glovebox and drive slowly through electromagnetic storms, hoping to catch a whisper.

And the sky is still like a TV tuned to a dead channel.