ORIGINAL ARCHIVE: DEMOS AND OUTTAKES 2017 – 2025
148 Transmissions
There's a lot of talk about cultural appropriation these days. A lot of people are setting themselves on fire about it and waving their genitalia around on social media about it as though somebody somewhere might give two shits. In my music and in my writing I do not appropriate.…
Möbius and Heavy Metal magazine. That was the shit when I was young. I was never any good with drawing. I couldn't draw an outhouse on a table napkin to save my life. "With a gun pointed at my head," as Parker used to say. But Möbius, his stuff was…
Imagine a gutter filled with Sunday morning filth - beer labels peeled from the bottle, piss, puke, and spit propelled by the previous nights' revelry. That's the music business. It's full of labels, definitions, marketing categories and the assholes that believe in them. People used to call us post punk,…
Fucking Danté. Who gives a shit? I was dating a boy in high school, and were we even dating or just providing each other orgasms in the thicket after class, anyway, he used to crush on the Purgatorio. Not even the Inferno. Not even the good shit where people are…
There's nothing left. Everything has burned. All of the evidence has been destroyed. The recordings have disappeared tho there's rumours that a few cassettes still exist. None of it matters. Parker is dead, Jordyn is gone. The Chemical Spray has vanished in a stab of sunlight. All I have are…
There's a lot of people more bad ass than me. Like almost everyone, really. In the 90's when I was just starting to experiment and put some swagger into my music there wasn't anybody more bad ass than Bjork. The rhythm track to Human Behaviour from Début cracked open my…
Jordyn, where are you? I know that you're out there somewhere. I can feel it. I'd know if you were gone for good. Your guitar was a dagger of fearsome joy in the heart of anyone who heard it. Memories of playing bass along side you at the Silvertone are…
We were opening for the Dukes of the Stratosphere, that much I remember. It was hazy and impossible the way that most dreams are. Stage was made of thick wood planks. Cast iron stands held these mics that glowed a pale mint green. We were sure that we were in…
Parker was a heedless current of energy not designed to survive in this world. Just a look from her could send me whirling. She was a living breathing narcotic and she got right inside me, curling up like a savage beast in my heart. That beast in my heart had…
Why is the measure of love loss? This is something that Parker used to ask. I know that she got it from a book but I could never figure out which one. It sounded like wisdom coming from her, like one of those zen koans, something that didn't have an…
Vampires are real. I know this because I am one. Not the lean shadowy kind that appears as a hunched silhouette on a staircase come to slay you in your sleep, no. I'm the normal kind of vampire. An average human vampire. The purpose of any life on earth is…
The Chemical Spray was originally a two piece. Just me and Jordyn. Alice appeared in a dream that I had one night. She walked right up me on the street the next day like she'd known me all my life. So we were a three piece for a while and…
You took yourself away from me and I missed you, then you were gone for good. Remember when we used to laugh together? When I saw myself reflected in your eyes, when you couldn't take your eyes off me? I remember how it felt to touch you. Skin so soft…
Part of the healing is taking control.
When Parker joined The Chemical Spray we were pretty much at full swagger. I was a wrecking ball of cocaine adrenaline and whiskey. My Rickenbacker was all churn and devastation. Jordyn wore these lavender dresses and drove everybody crazy with his painted eyes and lipstick. They all wanted to fuck…
"Hey, Buster," she said, emerging from a doorway in the alley. I hadn't seen her there when I staggered by. She stepped into the weak vector of light from the street lamp overhead that was filling with little slivers of rain. She was wearing a long dark coat and her…
This is the legendary hood. Hastings-Sunrise east Vancouver represent. Home of Black Mountain and Dayton Boots. This is where I live. Among the artists and musicians and poets. You can find me at The Jackalope most nights, hanging around under the Jesus Lizard poster drinking that Driftwood IPA while the…
That buzz snap of static and peel of feedback may sound sloppy but it's designed to get your attention. To call the proceedings to order. That's the quarter inch plugging into the Orange and the blissful wall of distorted fuzz that emerges is a type of sonic brain scrub that…
there's nothing left to do or say, there's no place left to go, your eyes pass right thru me, when I see you at the show. your tantrums are performance for illusions you believe the tears you cry can only dry upon the fabric of your sleeve. the street will…
I did not realize until it was too late that she was a master of the grift.
Rock and roll songs are easy to write. Noise is the key element, the essential thing. If you're not making noise, pushing the sounds of your instrument past what's its done before in other songs that you've written or heard then you're not practicing rock and roll. You're repeating some…
Lean visions of avarice have displaced you in my heart. The scorn of early morning dawdling on the neighbour's lawn in that summer dress as the dew licks your ankles. I have moved into a abandoned parking lot high above the city to warm that slippered ghost. To conceal it…
I wouldn't necessarily say that Jordyn hated our fans but I don't recall him having more than a handful of positive interactions with them. Jordyn could melt down a city with his playing and there were some nights or afternoons in rehearsal where he would do things inside our songs…
I never can tell what comes first the song or the dream. The song becomes the dream and the dream emerges from the song eventually, brand new fresh from the shower like a revelation and only later in some basement repose would it seem like a memory that I'd just…
There's a lot of room to move around creatively when nobody gives a shit about what you're doing. Some of my favourite memories of playing with the Chemical Spray are the shows when nobody came or even better were the ones where we'd open for some hot shit indie band…
I have never been a terribly observant person. I have never seen the things that are in front of me the way that they're supposed to be seen. I didn't make the connections that other people seemed to make and I was often oblivious to the simple, common logic that…
None of us were who we were supposed to be. We were all mutations, 'aberrations released from the tyranny of the norm' as Jordyn would say. In the outside world we were terrible. We didn't act right, didn't say things right, stole shit like candy bars and wondered genuinely why…
I recorded a 23 minute cassette of mostly unlistenable noise under the name Dragstrip Courage sometime back in the late 90s. The recordings were made using a crappy four track that I had liberated from a friend's studio the previous week, and constituted little more than my early experiments with…
Jordyn and I were sitting around one late August afternoon on that old dilapidated baby blue couch at the Land Palace while listening to volume three of the Dope Guns and Fucking in the Streets comp and blowing some trees when our landlord, the ex-convict who escaped a penitentiary up…
Alice of Bogata. Darkstar of the Chemical Spray, Angel of Battery, Poet of the Dream Cycle, Executioner of Dealers High on Their Own Supply.
Resolutions have never been easy for me. I don't mean the goofy shit that people say to themselves on New Years Day, either. Magic doesn't work that way, if it did we'd all be transforming into our visions of our best selves all afternoon and every day. That would be…
Jo leaned over the diner table and blew a tight cone of smoke out the side of her mouth as she did so. Her shirt collar was missing a few buttons at the top from last night's tussle with Angie and I could see the smooth white slopes of her…
My editor keeps telling me that I have to remember to be very specific with my genre. She says that if I write outside my genre then the audience will become confused and give up on my story. I say that's bullshit and she says no it's not and then…
I needed to go see Francis because I needed a favour but he was a hard man to track down. If anybody knew how to get me into the Mawntauk without anybody asking any questions it was him. Most people are sticky. Things become attached to them and help to…
There's this piece of writing that I abandoned about twenty years ago about a girl named Camille who spent her summer vacation working at a food cart selling enchiladas at the county fair when she fell in love with a pimply-faced kid named Devon who drove around in the Oscar…
The problem with the unknown, my uncle used to say, is that you can never be sure when it has actually arrived or when you've just hit another patch of uncertainty. This coming from a man who confided to me under a soul-revoking vow of secrecy when I was probably…
Janie and I were laying together in my bed smoking early that morning when the phone rang. A telephone call before seven am meant that either somebody had the wrong number or that something somewhere had gone wrong and a friend or family member, probably my mother, was calling to…
We drove back into the city over the bridge from the north shore. Just me and Parker. It was a beautiful day in early September and the golden afternoon light was cutting through the streets and setting the trees quietly ablaze above the neighbourhoods of east Vancouver. I eased the…
Dr Madeleine, sitting amid the sun slanted minimalism of her midtown office took a deep breath and leaned forward slightly on that blue rolling chair that seemed slightly too small for her and was probably designed by some fey European genius. "You know, Buster, people are allowed to have their…
"You're either here by accident or because you know something," he said as he stood up from the little table with its scrawny lamp throwing a weak glow. I couldn't see his face. His green t-shirt was tucked into the front of his blue jeans behind a square silver belt…
The music of Stereolab is a sort of alien visitation designed to lobotomize the listener and leave them not a stupefied shell of their former self but rather a new being whose soul has been scraped clean and whose mind has been pried open, doors removed from the hinges and…
Chrome Priest was the opening band for The Insouciant Glances at the Niagara the night of the legendary snow storm that blew over a big tree that crushed Tommy’s white Econoline and doomed a half dozen bands to cancel their mini tours to Seattle and Portland that winter. Chrome Priest…
I wrote a story once called Windows and Avenues Out. It was about how art and music can take us away from our normal everyday lives. It was a sloppy and overt piece of writing that blasted the reader with chunks of thinly veiled narrative on how tenuous and exhilarating…
The place was called the Mango Room. It was down on Keefer in Chinatown and it was only accessible after midnight and if they didn’t know you then you weren’t getting in. Alice called it the Garden of Arcane Delights and she wasn’t far wrong. It had everything that we…
In 2003 we released a record called Songs of Love and Disaster. This was shortly after Parker had joined the band officially and we were riding a wave of creative adrenaline that was better than any drug. Parker was a ferocious goddess of glam and as a band we were…
Nothing changed for me until somebody told me that writing was a form of magic, a means of channeling unknown energies and wisdom, a way of changing the present and the future through action. The action of putting one word in front of another until there’s enough words to complete…
People are starting to recognize me and that’s a bit of a problem. An image of me at the top of this feed is unnecessary and so I’ve removed it. It’ll only serve to confuse things down the road anyway once I get to the whole murder aspect of the…
There were always a lot of replicants prowling the Silvertone in those days. It’s no wonder that they shut the place down even though it was infinitely cooler, in its eastside transgressive way, than the garbage fire of corporate neon beer signs and classic rock cover bands that replaced it.…
Jordyn’s philosophy of musical composition as it applies to The Chemical Spray: burn the motherfucker down but leave the charred skeleton, the broken foundation, the smouldering cinders of what used to stand, the wall that used to block the wind, to hold the ceiling, and provided the pale green latex…
The Chemical Spray, when it was just Jordyn and I, was designed to keep people away from us, the music acting as a sonic ward against sycophants, stooges in tapered black denim jeans, and all varieties of slouching hipster trash that would stand around with their arms crossed at a…
‘We are the annihilation of nature. We are the blight. We are the poison in the root of love. We are the final tremor; after that, silence stillness death. We are the light in the uppermost window going dark. We are the broken shopping cart rusting in the mud. We…
Creativity is a jail, it’s a lie, it’s a brief episode of agency in a world so prefabricated and ordained that delusion is the default state of being. Everybody thinks that they’re the exception to the rule but everybody is the rule and that’s the trick that’s where the whole…
I got a friend who goes by the name of Smash. I don’t actually know whether he goes by that name anymore, that may not be quite accurate, but that’s what some of us call him. Those of us that know him from back in the day. Smash has set…
Look at that she said to me pointing out across the city at the fog glowing like a mutant whisper among the orange industrial cranes of the port. The city was a lazy dream below us. Lights strung across the bridge in the distance glowed like a final pronouncement; it’s…
Memory is a dangerous place for me. Its like a drop of mercury, the most mysterious and hard core of all the metals. I was fascinated by mercury when I was in high school chemistry class. I have always imagined that it’s actually some sort of quasi-intelligence, something alien and…
We are in my bed in the old place on King Street. The one that overlooked the intersection where I first saw Jordyn, years before we ever met, loping along looking down at the side walk long hair obscuring his face, carrying his guitar in a soft case. Jo was…
- buster... The morning sun was on her skin. There was a buttery smoothness to it. The tiny almost translucent hairs on her arms were a delicate army marching towards me at daybreak. Insomnia woke me an hour or so before dawn most days and I would lay in bed,…
The name of my psychologist is Dr Madeleine Wisconsin and she has an office in the middle of town that bestows more peace upon me than I ever let on. Big windows let in waves of sunlight and on most days I can see the mountains beyond the skyscrapers and…
- Buster, when I use the words sexual union, what does that mean to you? What does it evoke? - Fucking. It evokes fucking. - interesting. Can you please say some more about that? - I love fucking. It’s the best thing about being alive. I think about it all…
- your music projects a lot of anger, dissonance, and confusion. Do you feel that this might be an expression of some of the frustration that you have mentioned in previous sessions regarding your sexual relationships with women? - I think that you’re reaching a little bit there, Dr Madeleine.…
- do you believe the art hanging on the wall in your office puts people at ease? It makes me agitated. - I try to curate this small collection with pieces that might calm a person when they come to see me. Soft colours and gradual transitions have been shown…
For a few years there it seemed like the only thing that I lived for was Saturday night and Sunday morning. Saturday night was a crescendo of music, lights and liquor, a blur of narcotics, and a fog of loud, utterly forgettable conversation._ Sunday morning was a smoking crater of…
I can’t decide if this is an evocation or a summoning. What am i doing, where am I going? What will I find when i get there?_
There’s a type of loneliness that only exists in the departure lounges of small town airports. Early in morning, pre-dawn, with my coffee too sweet, I am embraced by the currents of recycled air. Young women near me are writing in their journals in ink and it seems so hopeful…
There’s a very fine line that exists between love and stupidity. The texture of the line changes and morphs from the hairs breadth of a freshly sharpened grade school pencil tracing the division on brittle parchment to the thicker crumble of kohl beneath their eye. Other instances are nearly invisible.…
If you’ve ever spent any time hanging around the live music scene, especially the furtive niche of experimental noise and heavy metal which is where The Chemical Spray plied its harrowing trade, then you know that it’s full of wallowing losers and manipulative assholes who prey on the delicate fluids…
The flawless motion of the celestial bodies has always confused me. How do they work that shit out with all this abundant chaos and clumsy interstitial garbage floating around and colliding like a bunch of malfunctioning droids bent for disaster? I mean the masters could dream symphonies into existence in…
They say that forgiveness is a sin and that revenge is the territory of angels. This is from a book of religion in the colony of hate and my grandmother was a fierce prophet. There was no manner of sunlight that a curtain couldn’t hide and no thickness of paper…
*recalibrating*
There you are. I see you now. You’re dancing bars of coloured static leaping disappearing distorting disintegrating burning and corroding. Somehow human. I can hear your voice warping windblown and desolate whispering across time begging me to wake up. | image @lucas.zimmermmann
The best work only happens when no one is looking. I used to do my best writing on the fire escape overlooking a pedestrian alley to the side of the three story brownstone walk-up where I lived back when Jo and I were dating and things were good. I remember…
- I know that you’re being careful with the details, Buster, and I respect that. And you know that I have to make a report to the authorities if I suspect that a client is going to hurt himself or others. # - Yeah, I get it. I’m not going…
Three Missing Stories of Mescaline Headdress are the earliest things that I can remember from the era and even as I summon their memory from that vanishing point I know that what I am receiving are really just the equivalents of ruined polaroids that have been left to suffer the…
This is a story of memory, trauma, erasure, and [re] discovery. It’s about what happens when the storyteller abandons the scene, leaves things unsaid, unrevealed. What happens to the untold story over time? Does it disintegrate or disappear? What makes a memory? Is it possible to reliably reconstruct the things…
The only rule of writing that I feel is indisputably, universally true is ‘never write about sitting in a cafe when you’re sitting in a cafe.’ That sort of bullshit behaviour opens up an inexorable negative point in the creative fabric around you and takes whatever remaining good ideas that…
The dream is cloaked in the deepest blue, the sky is a living thing a wave the wing of a bird an undulation of living matter yet to be categorized that lurches and swirls around me, runs a rough finger along my jaw line, pushes me forward, drags me sideways,…
It was dusk and the ghost mountains were dissolving into grey ripples lapping against the darkening sky. The stars were out early and the half moon hung in the sky like a skipping stone, impossibly smooth. I sat on one of those giant immovable chucks of wood on Jericho Beach…
Jordyn had a theory that he called boots on the ground. Maybe it was more a philosophy than a theory. Maybe it was just a collection of words spilled out between us that took on the airy shape of life. Maybe it was more of a melody than anything else,…
Room One at The Montauk: it was as legendary for its silences as it was for its pristine floor to ceiling windows looking north and west across the dirtnap of train tracks, the yellow mounds of sulphur, the homes of the doomed clinging to the mountainside, their own windows winking…
‘It’s easy to stand out when you’re surrounded by trash.’ Jo again. The ash of her cigarette was a slow growing grey arc that drowsed toward the yellow formica table in the kitchen at the famous Orange House. Sun cut through the window. A daffodil plucked from a neighbours garden…
The Chemical Spray was a blight of noise emanating from the deserted alleyways of east Vancouver in the dull pocket of a new age. The towers had come down and the world seemed like it was on fire, it raged with uncertainty and everywhere around us were the trembling minions…
One night, bent over a coffee table strewn with crumpled cans of Pils, glass ashtrays full of bent half-smoked cigarettes and balls of darkened tin foil, Sunset and I developed our Unified Theory of Lines. The Theory basically states that time moves in one direction inexorably to death unless it…
I started reading David Sedaris because of the door girl at the Sugar Refinery the night that Weaponized State opened for The Insouciant Glances. The door girl made a brief flicker of eye contact with me as she broke my ten and stamped the inside of my left wrist with…
This book is a prism for ghosts to pass through on their way to becoming ordinary objects with disintegrating shadows. | image @mc__monster
Sunset was burning a cigarette already as he sat in a booth by the window at the Smile. It was just past six in the morning. Cars hissed by along Pender Street, a woman bundled in blue pushed a shopping cart overflowing with trash along the sidewalk. Sunset was wearing…
“So you hooked up with D last night? How’s she doing?” I asked Sunset as we sat at the Smile, the pale early morning light fighting through the soft roil of fog on the street outside the window. The cool bite of autumn in the air that morning. “What are…
Even an unknown defunct noize band from the furthest western reaches of time and space gets a website, I guess. Who knows how these things happen but thanks to Maia Turnstile for making it so. Looking forward to seeing this go live one day. Maybe it’ll help.
There was a limpid matter of factness to the neighbourhood that morning. The north shore mountains possessed no grandeur, the straight slipped like the an old silk shawl under the bridges and into the ocean. No faint mist clung to the trees and the sky was a churn of greys.…
The city that morning was pure aftermath. A silence that settled in your chest tumbled from dark alleys carrying with it a faint smell of moulder. Thin mist clung to the buildings and turned streetlights into vague luminescent dandelion heads that floated among the branches of trees reaching out from…
The city takes its first breath about an hour before dawn. The birds still sleep and all the alleyway denizens, the insomniacs, the shuffling lost wanderers, and the empty eyed heathens returning from dreams of corrosion and pain - some key piece of clothing always missing and forgotten - are…
Take me here at the laundrette is what she said to me but I didn’t of course. I’m not that much of a primitive. The cold angles of the machines shimmying and the towels tumbling in the industrial dryers behind us. The street was abandoned. It was late and all…
My mother had many virtues. Almost too many to count. She held us when we were affiliated. I would come home from school my nose bloodied and my upper lip encrusted with dirt from a ditch that was the geographic midpoint between school and home, and my memory fresh with…
I came to destroy. To hurt what you love. To feel the warm liquid between my fingers as I rip out human circuitry and leave a mess on the floor. It isn’t fair, it isn’t particularly honest but it’s in the programming and the directives are clear. That’s the sort…
I am writing, good doctor, because I want to destroy the world. The pain that I feel, the lacerating wounds that I carry with me into the street, the price for being born into this fucking life. Writing is a better option than suicide because it’s a conscious act of…
Alice was summoning the Nordic death faeries that night. She was rocking the corpse paint again. Her face was ghostly pale, eyes were hidden by the torn wings of a dragon, and her lips were black and exacting. Her hair was pulled back and glimmered with purple aerosol speckle. The…
Are we dead? I don’t think so. How would you know? Well I’d ask around? Ask who? What if it’s just me and I don’t know shit? It wouldn’t be much of a surprise. What that I don’t know shit? No, that you’re dead. Some might argue that you’ve been…
The summers were heavy with heat and you could sweat to death just standing still on the street corner. Standing on stage under hot lights in a room crowded with people smoking and drinking and sweating and possessing a wide range of philosophies for personal hygiene makes for memories that…
Maurice was driving and we were doing a slow roll through the back boulevards of east Vancouver just off The Drive. We were looking for somebody’s house, probably trying to score a little weed from some side entrance garden suite with a prominent lava lamp and a Peter Tosh flag…
I wake up exhausted like I haven’t even slept. Sluggish, depleted, my mind a cold crater left by a distant mysterious impact all of the alien gases and poisons long since leeched into my body turning my blood and bone into some mutant formula that would make a good backstory…
Introducing the #newstyle. Swipe Left Chronicles. Images and text and images of text.
In which a woman named Cynthia prepares to address a small gathering in one of the opulent meeting rooms at the Mauntauk Club where i worked as a bartender in order to pay the bills back when I crushed massive bass riffs with The Chemical Spray. #swipeleft | image @renatabajko
It’s easy to be lonesome for the west. I sometimes hear voices in my head that are not my own. They’re not trying to convince me of anything. They’re not providing malicious instruction like in a horror novel. They’re providing voiceovers for establishing shots from movies that I’ve never seen.…
I dreamed that I was dead but somehow still conscious. Capable of movement and self-direction, still a subject of gravity, still capable of existential fatigue. But dead. No pulse, no heartbeat, couldn’t fog a mirror. I want to make clear that I had not become a zombie or vampire or…
In which Parker Shambolic tells Marty Gagosian what’s up outside a Rocket from the Crypt show at the Commodore Ballroom on a rainy October night circa 2003. #swipeleft #amwriting #writersofinstagram #rocketfromthecrypt @commodoreballroom #vancouver #music #fiction | image @b.oeriksson
The radiation supply has diminished over the years and I’m bereft of the warm embrace of human commotion that had jostled me along like a nutshell that’s been swept up by the current of a stream. Print advertising has never matched the profound power of the Memorex ad with the…
In which buster pays a winter visit to Alice who lives in a cabin overlooking the Nicola Valley. It is cold, their breath hangs in the air like vanishing blades. Alice asks about the gun. Swipe left to read their exchange. | image @m_r92 | #swipeleft #amwriting #writersofinstagram #fixtion #fiction…
I don’t know which is worse the blank, desperate pain and emotional churn of my post-addiction years or today’s digital news cycle with its daily injections of anguish and uncertainty. It’s an empty and blighted landscape, full of rage and strange fears that’s sort of the evil twin to the…
Insomnia is good for a lot of things like chasing sneezes and endless foggy spirals of recollection. I ended up on the beach at Jericho one night, the van hunkered alone in the darkened lot behind me. I used to go there after gigs or long hours in the studio…
:: recalibrating :: | image @martinstranka
Life is what happens when you're making other plans she said with something like sarcasm as she rubbed away the condensation from the interior of the passenger side window of my rattling 74 Dart. The fog’s on the other side of the glass, Parker, I said, gesturing through the windshield…
The thing at the time was ugly and banal barely even worth mentioning but looking back now it is imbued by some magic of memory, context I guess, the slow accumulation of other memories stacked on top or scattered around it, not everything is worth remembering, and most things are…
Standard issue middle school wooden chair. Sturdy institutional grade construction. Built to last. More than enough science involved to support the weight of a body in this empty room. Empty except for the dust, the body, some insignificant detritus, and a blur of sunlight through a window that’s covered by…
Start at the beginning is what they say and I used to think that there was no other option. I guess I should say that I used to think this before I started doing memory work with my brain doctor talking person up in her air conditioned office. The one…
The Parker that I met that night at the Underground Junction wasn’t the Parker that I came to know as a bandmate and friend. Like iI said we didn't talk much that night. I might have said two words to her, took one look at her floppy hat and laconic…
The last show that the Chemical Spray ever played as a two piece, just me and Jordyn, was at the legendary 1067 club off Granville Street. Around the corner from the neon sex shop and down the next alley behind a dumpster and through an unmarked and unlit doorway. A…
“Foot on throat, bullet in the chamber. That’s how you gotta live your life, son,” dad would say as he squinted through the dirt smeared windshield of this rattling old GMC pick up truck taking me to school. The wipers blades were ancient ribbons that scraped across the glass only…
I remember when I was real stupid. This is going back a few years. Not that many tho, let’s be honest. I’d see people wearing sunglasses on overcast days walking their dogs through the neighbourhood and I’d immediately think that they were drug dealers. Super ripped on some high octane…
Station called it silver and spelled it out in all caps with a thick black sharpie wherever the finest in dirtbag graffiti was being served in those days. Sometimes her dark markings looped across the faded linoleum walls of basement clubs or the dank stalls of Chinatown afterhours establishments but…
Pick your poison mom had said to me over her shoulder as she mixed a salad for dinner in a red bowl on the small square of Formica counter space between the stainless steel sink and the opaque square of the microwave oven with its confusion of dials and buttons.…
When people ask me that question I always wonder what it is that they expect to hear. Do they want a biography, a list of childhood highlights, little charcoal sketches of past traumas shaded softly to prevent the transference of revelation? What version of events will satisfy their curiosity? What…
“Anybody ever tells you that they know the guy that invented the Filet o Fish then that person is full of shit. Ain’t nobody got that information,” Sunset said to me before stuffing a generous pinch of limpid French fries into his mouth. He had pulled the fries from a…
“He hung himself in the neighbours garage,” Jordyn said. “They were away on holiday so nobody found him for a week. We figured that he'd finally left us. Bought himself a one way ticket out of town and just fucked off. But he was next door the whole time.” Jordyn…
“I ain’t gonna tell you that we started the revolution or anything like that,” Alice said to the guy with the clipboard. She was doing her best to sit up straight in the chair that the camera crew had set up in our studio but she couldn’t help slouching into…
Tina wanted to talk about wolves but Sunset was only talking cinema that night. They were seated at the back table in Vape Burger near the converted cigarette machine that dispensed art in the shape of cigarette packs from the 60’s. Tina was working on one of the bartender’s special…
“Wild Zero,” the bartender said as she set our drinks down on the table. “The name of the movie that you’re talking about is Wild Zero.” Sunset whirled in his chair, an index finger raised in vague admonishment. “The band of zombie killing motorcyclists in the movie, they’re called Guitar…
“Setting fire to abandoned structures is not something that I do. It’s low grade arson with little risk and there’s no money in it. At best it’s a weak act of revenge or a petty attempt at intimidation, and like I said, it just isn’t my style.” Alice’s voice came…
:: CORPSEFLOWER :: - Murray slipslides towards me from across the bar, flounces really, like a second string marionette whose master is in the throes of a twitch, to tell me a joke and I play along. “I got a new band, man, we’re called Corpse Flower,” he says. “Sounds…
:: Spirit of Decay (Inner Harbours Mix) :: We moved out of the place on east third. Left a lot of stuff behind, basically burned our apartment deposit cheque in the middle of the living room floor. The old couch sagged and the dust that we kicked up in our…
The place had the ache of a middle school haircut and the desolation of the family drive way after a first divorce but it was home and that’s where he lived.
The only language that we understood in those days was rock n roll. It was the only thing that we knew anything about, the only place where we felt anything close to love, and the only place we might feel comfortable enough to express it. We didn’t care about the…
In the dreams we have our work. They tell us where to go, what to do, who to kill.
“The problem with working at the bank is that you can’t puke on the desk,” is what Sunset was saying to me. He was wearing his meshback bubble cap and Lungbutter tour shirt. We were sitting against the wall at back of the Silvertone with its stapled upholstery and a…
We had been spending more time in the studio away from people in the scene. Trying to break apart our sound and find something new. Jordan had been encouraging me to work more with the synths and was pushing me toward long ambient pieces without an arc or a form.…
“There’s a guy at the club who looks like a skinny version of that movie star with the hair and the lips who drove the burnt el camino if that’s anybody’s anything.” - @weaponizedstate sent via twitter for iPhone Sunset was riding the edge on twitter, apparently. Probably half cut…
Disappearing is easy in a city like Vancouver. A day, a couple of weeks, or for me, much longer than that. People don’t care, people forget. People leave you alone.
Death.
Hesitation would have killed me. I see that now. The place went up fast like it was built from old newspaper and pure oxygen but I couldn’t have known that by seeing it for the first time in the dim ambient light of that September afternoon.
You turn that corner and you know. You see them. Maybe first maybe not but you know it’s too late to turn around. Sudden movements seem unwise so you dig your hands deeper into your jacket pockets. Tighten your shoulders, put your head down and keep walking.
Confused, of course, by the proximity to reality. I need some sort of puffy zone between me and the thing, some obvious tell. Maybe the dealer in their flammable hat rubs their wrist too many times, tugs at an ear, worries the ring hanging there, burnished or otherwise. Is there…
I changed the world, man. Changed the world. I cooked up so much Neo-Citran in the back seat of that Buick in the summer of 94 that they changed the fucking recipe, man. Think about that. They changed the damn recipe cuz they knew that I knew that, it was,…
The line up that night was particularly brutal.
It was the sort of situation that I would aggressively avoid in normal circumstances. A curated series of public performances by local spoken word artists on the back lawn of a Presbyterian church located in the old neighbourhood.
It was Weaponized State, On Lasagna Beach, Urban Dirt Farmers, and the Chemical Spray at Patti’s Late Night Supper Club, an antique and all but inaccessible diner located above a neon sex shop on Granville which meant that Alice was late for soundcheck.
All that any of us truly wanted was to be dead. That was our private, unspoken seal. Hot wax between us cooling, coalescing, becoming hard, pressed, embossed by cold metal in a shape we would never learn.
The oldest language in the world is something that we have never given a name to, something that we share though rarely speak of, it occupies the space between us as we go about our days, some have even written that it literally is the area between us, that it…
I started hanging around the east side galleries looking for a fix. Bronski’s, The Layabout, Front Street. Small places, usually a single room, cheap lighting, often with a single lean attendant that would unlock the door to let me in and then linger in the darkened back room while I…
The silence of the morning was like an empty chamber. He could see from the window that there was nobody down there. Maybe someone huddled in a doorway. Alone with nothing knowing that no pedestrian would be walking to the coffee shop or bakery or bank and taking a second…
I was standing in the kitchen staring into a book and feeling the warm glow of the late afternoon sun coming in through the window beside me as it turned the pages to fire.
