#8 excerpted from “THE GET QUICK FILES: CHOOSE YOUR OWN CONJECTURE” as remembered by Mark Question
The Age of Mirage
1987 - 1994
There are pockets of time that behave like trapdoors — one minute you’re riding high on the Boss Level, the next you’re crawling blindfolded through the broken smoking aftermath, licking dust off the plastic spines of your own back catalogue. Welcome to the years 1987 to 1994: The Age of Mirage. The wilderness years, if your wilderness has Lost Highway vibes, and an expired lease in every major city from Krakow to Reno.
Mitchell Joy and Erjk Vanderwolf were still standing, but no one could tell you quite how. Post-Legend Tripping, post-fraudulent lawsuits and fraudulent gurus, the two remaining heads of The Get Quick hydra were holed up in a revolving series of rented studios, abandoned clubs, and flooded bunkers — anywhere the ghosts of their former selves couldn’t reach them too easily. They had stopped being The Get Quick in the mythic “Heirs to The Eon Throne” sense and started being something closer akin to outlaw double agents caught in their own gravity well.
Gone were the black-mass stadium rituals and banana republic coups disguised as concerts. What came instead was the band breaking into a haunted amusement park with chiming 12-strings and calling it “JangleGoth.” Critics were divided, fans were confused, and the band, well, the band seemed oddly serene in the middle of it all. As if they had finally accepted they were no longer driving the car, just enjoying the view as it careened into stranger and more tuneful terrain.
Their collaborators in this odd epoch were a patchwork crew of night scholars and sonic vagrants. Christian Hait, still draped in his jazz magician’s silks and Hammond organ hex loops, drifted in and out like a dimly remembered séance. Riko Litts provided anxious brass and war-room paranoia. Colonel Boran showed up now and then with a suitcase full of thermionic oscillators. Dr Watson? No one’s sure quite when he arrived or if he ever even left.
But the truth — the real truth — was that Joy and Vanderwolf were fighting a private war in the studio. Against time. Against irrelevance. Against each other. They were crawling through the wreckage of their own mythos, plucking out bits of melody and vision, holding them up to the light and asking, Is this still worth it? Are we still The Get Quick, or just two very tired men trapped inside a malfunctioning legend machine?
And here’s the kicker: despite the internal hellscape, despite the press calling it a “minor phase” or a “sober recalibration,” they made some of the most beautifully dangerous music of their careers. You just had to be reckless enough to find it.
Their live shows morphed from well-crafted concerts to instantaneous “happenings.” Sporadic, feral affairs. Basement temples in Eastern Europe, abandoned oil rigs wired for sound, one infamous show in Patagonia broadcast only via shortwave through a network of Cold War number stations. Sometimes it was just Joy and Vanderwolf, faces like painted skulls, dragging old ghosts out through MIDI rigs and space delay. Other times the whole crew assembled, like mercenaries called back into service for one last metaphysical heist.
This wasn’t about popularity. It was about survival. It wasn’t about money. It was about memory. It was about whether a song can still be sacred if no one hears it but the person who’s performing it.
So yes, 1987 to 1994. Where we find The Get Quick howling, hallucinating, slithering through the sloughed off skin of their own nostalgia and landing in that beautifully deranged trench where myth eats its tail. Mitch and Erjk were racing against their internal clocks like fugitives trapped inside their own feedback loop.
And revolutions that happened in silence. In headsets. In hearts. And in that wild-eyed place where all true TGQ transmissions originate — from the edge of the speaker cone, where the signal gets wild and the truth tastes like lighter fluid.
The Age of Mirage.
Welcome back, comrades. Let’s pretend we never left.