#9 excerpted from “THE GET QUICK FILES: CHOOSE YOUR OWN CONJECTURE” as remembered by Mark Question
The Stereophrenic Years
1995 - 1999
By the blinding heat of 1995 L.A., the summer of Orenthal James Simpson and the Trial of the Century — the type of hot hype that makes the vinyl ripple and the reel-to-reel hiss like roaches in heat — The Get Quick began mutating again. Not slowly. Not politely. This was a full-blown psychoactive rebirth. Christian Hait had disappeared into domestic bliss — diapers, bathtubs, maybe a garden gnome or two — and Mitch and Erjk wasted no time turning the void into a battleground.
Enter: Stuart Kendrick and Klaus Vallis — two mad bastards from the legendary 60s pioneers The Slip Hounds, reassembled from the detritus of white jazz noise trips and early avant-garde gutter punk rituals. These were not mere musicians — these were sonic warlocks, elder statesmen of a genre that didn’t yet exist, returning from exile with meat in their teeth and synthesizers tucked like batwings in their armpits.
The band wasted no time going completely off the map and got right down to charting out new ones. Roles changed like poker hands in a Las Vegas missile strike. Instruments transmuted. Mitch smashed the living hell out of the drum set then vaulted the cymbals to sing lead on a soul stomper while the walls melted. Klaus stalked the stage like a lysergic tiger, a bastard executioner, riding on orchestral bells and beating his bass like it owed him money. Stuart laid down thunderous riffs with one hand and triggered epileptic noise-storms with the other — Moogs screaming, amps howling, everything redlined to hell and back.
Meanwhile, Erjk — that twisted maestro of feedback and found sound — wired the entire affair into an electric death march of buzzsaw guitars, jungle drums, alien radio interference, and mad saxophone solos that sounded like a pterodactyl being tasered during the mid-flight movie.
The resulting music was unstable — yet unstoppable — an art-damaged labyrinth of personal psychodramas and cosmic tantrums stitched together like a quilt sewn by lunatics. No two songs sounded like they came from the same plane of existence, let alone album. One minute it was all grand cinematic vistas and Martian lullabies, the next it was a knock-down-drag-out bar fight in an East Berlin electromagnetic reverberation chamber. A sonic Möbius strip. The madness was intentional. Probably...
And the live shows? A full-blown Dionysian freakout. The sets were longer, louder, weirder. Songs expanded into 10-minute movements full of howling improvisation, wrong turns, and beautiful accidents. Nothing was sacred. Stu called it “coloring outside the lines.” I called it ritual combat with sound.
But here’s where things get really twisted: Mantaray — yes, that Mantaray — returned. Once impostors. Now allies. Like Werner Herzog directing a buddy cop film with a main cast along with their doppelgängers. Mantaray. The same old pseudo Quick show from the Cromicon era, now dressed in redemption and playing the role of TGQ’s Proxy Band. On the road, opening for their former selves. And maybe just becoming them all over again too.
It was beautiful. It was grotesque. It was high life, low art, and full-blast rock n roll lunacy — a decade-long trip through the fractured psyche of a band that refused to stay dead or play normal.
These were The Stereophrenic Years. If you weren’t there, you wouldn’t believe it. And if you were... Well, I hope you got out alive.
March 1995
TGQ: Quick To Move On
Gordon Fife, The Chiffon Racket
The Get Quick have engaged two new musicians to replace original erstwhile bassist Coco LeBree and his stalwart stand-in, Christian Haight — who is leaving the fold to work on solo material.
The newcomers — both former members of New York’s infamous Slip Hounds — are Klaus Vallis and Stewart Kendrick, and they have joined TGQ for concerts in West Germany before undertaking a five week tour of the US and Canada from September 3.
Prior to the personnel switch, on August 13, drummer and band-leader Mitchell Joy himself collapsed from what was described in the music press as “exhaustion and hypertension,” while in Ecuador completing work on the Dig My Wig documentary.
He was ordered two-weeks convalescence and his wife immediately broke several social engagements and booked a redeye to be at his side.
* * * * * *
July 1995
New TGQ LP: It’s Radioactive! . . . No Really!
Solange Fontaine, Jet Chrome
Be warned: before you get your hands on it, the new album by The Get Quick is receiving a hefty dose of radioactive isotopes.
TGQ spent the last three months tracking their newest opus, BOILING METAL. As soon as the recordings were complete the tape reels were packed off to Prypiat, Ukrane — ground zero of the Chernobyl Disaster.
With a previous population of around 50,000, the city of Paypiat has been abandoned for the past nine years, and will probably remain unsafe for human habitation for another two-hundred and ninety-one. The tapes were transported deep into The Exclusion Zone by hazmat workers, where they are being left “to stew” for twenty-four hours. The reels will then be shipped back to Philadelphia where the album will be mixed and mastered at The Hero Lounge, S. True Smith’s underground concrete bunker.
Why expose the tapes to Caesium-137 (incidentally, the world’s most deadly radioactive isotope)? And what possible effect could Strontium 90 beta emitters have on reels of magnetic tape? No clear answers are coming from camp TGQ — so are we to assume that this is really just another elaborately orchestrated publicity stunt? Well, we’ll have to wait and listen to the record to find out for sure...
Just don’t listen to it with headphones — your brain might melt... or EXPAND!
HULK LOVE GET QUICK !
July 1995
TGQ FILES: THE CHERNOBYL SESSIONS
— Mark Question, still broadcasting from somewhere beneath the ruins of history
Listen: not all nuclear accidents are accidents. Some are dress rehearsals. Some are divine rituals. Some are just the cost of doing business when your band has been tampering with Soviet-era mind control frequencies since at least the Sulfuric Surfer EP.
Chernobyl? Full-time meltdown cloaking a broadcast event.
Rewind. April 1986. The Get Quick hadn’t toured in years, officially. Unofficially, they had been running recon behind enemy lines in alternate dimensions. There were whispers — strange, low-fidelity transmissions picked up by decommissioned submarine arrays, Soviet cosmonauts claiming to hear fractured versions of Black Amber Cronicas echoing through the ionosphere. Nobody believed them, of course. They’d been too long in orbit.
But something did happen that spring. Something radiant and terrible.
I have in my possession (or did, until my safe was “relocated” by men in hazmat suits) a charred memo from a Finnish intelligence operative who went missing on a vodka train between Leningrad and Pripyat. The document contains the phrase “The Fast Access Protocol”—underlined twice in red ink, followed by a crude drawing of a reel-to-reel tape labeled “MK-VANDER PHASE VII.”
The theory?
The Chernobyl disaster wasn’t triggered by mechanical error or bureaucratic negligence — it was the result of a sound. A waveform coded into the magnetic structure of test reactor 4, piggybacking through control systems via a pirated analog signal, possibly recorded on commandeered equipment once belonging to Colonel Boran during his alleged 1982 residency at the Moscow Conservatory of Sonic Reversal.
Yes, that’s right: they were trying to play the reactor. Like a cathedral organ made of uranium and unreliable math.
Mitchell Joy, for his part, denied everything—then promptly vanished into the Black Sea aboard a Turkish cargo ship full of percussion instruments and “emergency textiles.” When he reemerged in Ghent two years later, he had a shock white hair and pupils shaped like D-shafts. All he would say was: “We reached out for a chord that wasn’t there. But we opened something. Something we shouldn’t have.”
Of course, that Mitchell Joy was later proven to be an imposter.
Eyewitnesses from the zone (the ones who survived without glowing) described a low droning hum before the explosion. Some say it resembled the intro to the popular video game Mammothgon II: Reverse Kingdom. Others claimed it was a loop of detuned Ukrainian folk spells in 5/4 time. One technician simply wrote, “It sounded like the end of something that hadn’t started yet.”
After the event, Soviet archivists reportedly discovered a “songbook” buried in reactor ash—containing glyphic notations, bioacoustic diagrams, and a torn sleeve from a TGQ tour jacket (1974, Stunt of the Century). The jacket tested positive for radiation levels 34 times higher than the surrounding debris, and bore a stitched phrase in Cyrillic:
СТРУКТУРА ЛЖИ / STRUCTURE OF LIES
Colonel Boran was implicated in at least three separate investigations, one involving a self-playing piano unearthed in Belarus that emitted theta waves and caused spontaneous nosebleeds — at the very least. He later claimed he was working on “thermal sonics for healing purposes,” though his notes were confiscated and replaced with a three-page cartoon depicting a bear desecrating a picnic basket.
Dr Watson refused to comment, though he later released a solo EP titled The Graphite Angel, which, when played backwards, reportedly syncs perfectly with helicopter footage of the sarcophagus being sealed.
So what does it mean?
Nothing. Everything.
Like all true Get Quick operations, it exists at the shimmering intersection of sabotage, art, and astral overreach.
Chernobyl was not their fault. But it was their frequency.
And somewhere, beneath the concrete bones of reactor 4, something was recorded...
September 1995
TGQ Working Out The Kinks
Crispin Gaunt, Yard Rave Annual
Mister Mitchell Joy is reported to have been granted a clean bill of health and has now joined his bandmates at Stewart Kendrick’s Wynnewood cottage to begin rehearsals.
S. True Smith has booked studio sessions to complete the new LP, already scheduled for release in June. Meanwhile the band are said to have 23 hours of tape in the can, capturing the new rehearsals with a mobile recording unit. There are reportedly “new and dynamic versions” of classics from TGQ’s catalogue as well as some “interesting extended instrumentals” — though some portions have been deemed “utterly un-listenable.”
“We’ve also been covering a bunch of Kinks songs, and some Ramones — just for kicks,” Klaus Vallis confided.
The band begin a US tour on July 14, for which S. True Smith has negotiated them a minimum of $45,000 per concert against a percentage (60 – 70 per cent) of the gross. One date alone is rumored to be worth $88,000.
* * * * * *
April 1996
TGQ’s Secret Handshake
Oliver Qualls, The Mainline Times
The imposing home — with its decorative half-timbering and tall mullioned windows, steeply pitched roof and prominent cross gables — would be a monument almost anywhere else, but set in the wealthy hamlet of Gladwyne (situated along the affluent Main Line of Pennsylvania) it seems positively inconspicuous.
So why are some of the locals all a-tizzy?
Is it the fact that a notorious rock group have convened here to commence work on their new LP? Yes, The Get Quick rolled into town — and yet, there’s more to the story than meets the eye...
Long-standing residents claim the wooded property of said house conceals a second structure — a marble pillared mausoleum, which serves as a meeting place for a secret society known as The League Of Thursdays. Rumor has it that The League is modeled after the infamous Hellfire Club, and is thought to have taken its name from a novel by G K Chesterton.
And now there are the suspicious comings and goings of The Get Quick and the group’s motley entourage.
“We’ve rented this charming chateau and are currently working on our new album,” Mitchell Joy assures us. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
Not so, claims a local, who would rather not be named. Rather it is believed that Joy and Erjk Vanderwolf were initiated to the League Of Thursdays by Alex Magus, and have been members since the early 1970s. Other reputed past and present members of the L.O.T. include: Thomas Eakins, Sir John Betjeman, Louis I Kahn, Benny Hill and David Lynch.
A middle-aged denizen, who claimed to have explored the property as a youth, described his exploration of the mausoleum-type building and the discovery of a subterranean crypt, which led, through a series of roughly chiseled corridors, to an undiscovered system of natural cave formations that extended, maze-like, for miles.
The man (who demurred from giving his name) is of the opinion, judging by the frightening tableau and arcane artifacts that he glimpsed so long ago, that the group performs strange rites or rituals and possibly possesses secret knowledge capable of unlocking some dark power.
Other neighbors view The L.O.T. as harmless, suspecting that they are nothing more than a reclusive gentleman’s club.
“I am sure there is nothing at all sinister [concerning The League],” offered one such resident. “Bacchus and Venus should not be confused with Satan. I assume the members are no more dangerous than decadent-minded dilettantes, who perhaps spend their nights reading Byron, Sade and Rochester while sipping absinthe from a chalice fashioned from the skull of Thomas Paine.”
The man laughs and takes a puff of his pipe and I suddenly get a chill. There is a certain gleam to the innocuous suburbanite’s eye — Could he be an initiate of The League Of Thursdays?
I thank him and quickly hurry back to my car.
* * * * * *
June 1996
MERRY HELL — TGQ’s Gift To The World
Plantagent Hock, The Pylon Raga
The Get Quick’s double CD set MERRY HELL is finally out after the longest sell in the history of the record industry. Pre-sold to dealers four times already this year, it’s been a double album, a triple album and now it’s back down to a double with a “free” EP of four extra songs. Its see-sawing history of completion is inextricably linked with The Get Quick’s re-signing to Cromicon Lmt. for $13 million — reportedly the largest advance ever secured. And the word is out that S. True Smith is determined to exploit every trick in the book to recoup as much of their advance as possible. It seems to be working — MERRY HELL has worldwide advance orders of more than one million.
But what about the album itself?
Unlike most double albums, MERRY HELL doesn’t reek of self-indulgence — rather there’s scarcely a track that hasn’t been tastefully produced and prudently edited, creating a fascinating flow. And the scope of The Get Quick’s sound-sculpting has expanded enormously so that the 138-minute running time fascinatingly showcases their stylistic range and never drags.
* * * * * *
June 1997
Stu Kendrick & The Art Of Synesthesia
Violet McDade, Lurid Scene
Stuart Kendrick has lived his whole life with a condition known as synesthesia. Yes, synesthesia is a “condition.” Well, is it a disability or a gift? — in this case, most assuredly the later. There are many different types of synesthesia and countless variants, with completely different stimulus responses in each individual synesthete.
“Somehow the strands of sensory perception get crossed or jumbled and seem to flood into different areas of the brain,” explains Kendrick. “The synesthete will experience secondary sensations — for instance the letter W may appear violet in color or the feel of leather might trigger the taste of caramel in one’s mouth. Synesthesia can be used as a memory aid, because these secondary characteristics are constant — they never change. There’ve been quite a few times in my life when [this condition] has come in handy,” Stu admits.
People with synesthesia also often exhibit high levels of creativity. And Kendrick’s role in TGQ — a kind of sound-synthesist and tonal-sculptor — has obviously been greatly colored by his state of perception.
“Stu experiences sound — and everything else for that matter — differently, and often, I imagine, more intensely than the rest of us,” opines Mitchell Joy. “Because of this he seems to have a preternatural aptitude for the work he does with us. Although he also acts as a bit of a wildcard — as sometimes his choices are quite unfathomable to someone without his particular condition.”
And it’s been rumored among associates of the group that Stuart’s condition also occasionally causes him to suffer painful bouts of sensory overload.
“I hear colors, taste sound,” explains Kendrick, “So when I’m mixing music I try to put together the most harmonious and pleasing palette. But the associations of my secondary sensations are sometimes utterly bizarre sounding to others. Likewise there are some tonal combinations that sound completely pleasant to everyone else, while they leave me wincing and shivering in pain and terror.”
Erjk Vanderwolf summarizes: “Stu possesses frightening mutant powers that The Get Quick have endeavored to weaponize.”
“How sweet of you to say,” laughs Kendrick.
* * * * * *
September 1997
TGQ New Tour: Pure Aural Intoxication
Jigger Masters, Dead Hair Digest
For the first time in The Get Quick’s career it’s impossible to predict what kind of audience they’re going to attract for their latest world tour.
The capacity crowd of 17,000 at the Coliseu dos Recreios scarcely had time to digest the contents of the just-released EQUIPMENT CLINIC album. And the opening act of non-stop Basskommander tapes over a screening of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film LA MONTAÑA SAGRADA are not calculated to put them at ease.
“O sucesso selvagem e totalmente inesperado de "Donk King" os abriu tanto para o Top 40 quanto para o público rave. Mas, apesar do techno-flash, The Get Quick resistiu à tentação da autoindulgência. Seu set é cheio de ação, com músicas ininterruptas, improvisadas em um crescendo constante que o público europeu considera irresistível.
“Uma enxurrada de luzes e efeitos para transmitir seu estilo energético de rock, ostensivamente buscando atrair o público para junto deles. Eles conseguem isso porque nunca abrem mão de suas raízes. Eles entendem seu público tão bem quanto entendem sua música e detonam com os pés no chão.
“Assim que o show começa, há poucas complicações. Não há visuais que distraiam; nem mesmo luzes coloridas. O cenário é tão despojado quanto a apresentação. Foram-se os adereços, os figurinos e outros elementos teatrais sobre os quais The Get Quick construiu sua reputação nos anos 70. Em vez disso, eles voltaram ao básico e passaram 90 minutos de pura intoxicação auditiva.”
* * * * * *
February 1998
TGQ Beat It
Violet Strange, Council of Eleven
“We start with a droning note,” explains Klaus Vallis “then we double-track the same note — this time slightly de-tuned. When the two tracks are played back they mesh to create a single warbling tone, a vibrato-like effect of cyclic pulsations, or beats.”
Binaural beats seem to unlock an interesting characteristic of the brain, one of tricking the brainwaves, as it were. Brainwaves tend to mimic the frequencies of certain stimuli — and by employing the same frequency that the brain emits during deep meditation, the binaural beats are likely to induce just such a state in the listener.
“We’ve found that the beats still register in the brain — even after other sounds — instruments, songs — have been layered over top,” explains Mitchell Joy
So beware listener, next time you find yourself grooving to The Get Quick, it could be more than just a good tune, you could be the unwitting guinea pig of some strange brain alchemy.
* * * * * *
June 1998
TGQ Invade North America
Spud McGee, Buzzkrieg Magazine
The Get Quick arrived in New York on Good Friday aboard the SS France and are now preparing for their major concert tour of the North Americas.
The tour opens Monday at the Montreal Forum Concert Bowl and runs for three months. The concert concept, described as a “theatrical extravaganza” is based upon TGQ’s concept album THE FLESHY ANGUISH, which is planned for a simultaneous release in Britain and America.
The show has been likened to a Broadway review, re-imagined and translated into concert tour terms, replete with an adaptable and packable set provided by noted West End London lighting man George Gordon Spelvin, whose credits include THE ROCKY HORROR and SWEENY TODD.
The 10-piece expanded line-up includes: Mitchell Joy (drums and percussion) and some other dudes.
The theme of the album and the show is the breakdown of society after the holocaust, when men are deformed from the effects of radiation.
Sounds to me like it has all the potential of last year’s blockbuster Titanic. Although, which bit — the “blockbuster” or the “Titanic” — I’m not too sure...
* * * * * *
December 1998
LeBree’s Golden Pipes In Danger
Luther McGavock, Lord Lampooner
Coco LeBree faces grave uncertainty over his future singing career. He collapsed with a throat hemorrhage on the opening night of an eight-week season at Las Vegas’s Caesar’s Palace — an engagement that would have earned him $470,000 — and is now awaiting a major throat operation.
At present, LeBree cannot sing at all and, assuming the operation is successful, it would be many months before he could resume recordings or concerts. More seriously, there is a risk that the surgery could adversely affect his vocal cords, and perhaps his songbird days would be over. At this point we assume that LeBree is fully focused on abstaining from his beloved J&B blended Scotch whisky.
Surgeons report that the stubbornly conscious LeBree has been unwilling to don a patient’s gown and remains clad in his concert attire — a fitted piebald suit fashioned from the hide of an unborn pony.
* * * * * *
January 1999
‘THE IRON DREAM’ Still Just A Dream
Vivian McDade, Lurid Scene
Ernesto Bellini’s film THE IRON DREAM, originally slated for summer release has now been shelved until further notice. The reason for its sudden pull from the summer roster remains undisclosed, although many industry insiders believe that the controversial nature of the material has proved too potent to be overcome.
The film, based on a 1972 novel by Norman Spinrad, concerns an alternate reality wherein Adolf Hitler abandoned the Nazi movement and immigrated to the USA to become a science fiction writer. The story interweaves this alternate biography of Hitler with the plot of his final novel, Lord of the Swastika. The novel follows the struggle of humankind to band together and defeat various races of mutants in a quest for world supremacy.
Erjk Vanderwolf, who was cast as Feric Jaggar, the genetically pure human hero of the story within the film, has stated that the movie is “a rather pointed and comical critique of fascist ideologies in all their different guises — as well as a rip-roaring action yarn.”
Unfortunately the studio heads seem to be getting cold feet, and possibly feel that the film’s satire might be misinterpreted as homage. Bellini, who has been trying to secure financing for the film for the past two decades, is understandably frustrated.
“I couldn’t get this film made back then [in the late 70s] when directors had perhaps the most leeway to follow their vision. Now, if anything, the system has petrified into an efficient money machine, all but cutting off any project outside the mainstream models.”
“I don’t think [the studios] give the public enough credit,” Bellini continues. “They are so used to hitting the audience over the head with their heavy ham-fisted films, that they no longer think the public capable of understanding or even detecting subtlety. I, on the other hand, still believe that people are able to discern the difference between a tribute and a lampoon. Although perhaps,” he adds pointedly, “for Americans, some of the satire hits too close to home.”
* * * * * *
June 1999
Brain Machine
Fluffy McGoff, Tinfoil Anthem
The Get Quick are reportedly working on a new project tentatively called Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Mach-
December 1999 Brain Machine
Machine
Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain Machine Brain
Blip. Beep. Buzz. The machine flickers alive again. In an infinite loop. The pulse quickens, then shatters. The walls close in. The colors bleed. Brain machine.
* * * * * *
January 2000
TGQ Deactivate
Millicent Newberry, The Laughing Cavalier
Blah Blah Blah Blah. The end.
Or perhaps it is merely the beginning of the end, where the true depths of The Get Quick's sonic plague unfold like the splintering bones of some apocalyptic deity. For now, they have retreated into the shadows, their transmissions broadcast no longer. Sound waves, once the lifeblood of TGQ, now ripple in the silence, unheard, only felt as a distant pulse. No more tunes, no more messages. The band, like some folklore “surrealized” into collective myth, has been deactivated. A universal system abandoned.
But who can truly say when the machine stops? Only those who dare the Spiral can know what lies beneath the static. Perhaps this is but another trick — another chapter of their ritualistic charade.
The Get Quick are dead. Long live The Get Quick.
The machine hums in silence; the silence sings back...