The line up that night was particularly brutal.

Bromide, Ax and the Frozen Sea, Vomit Squad, and the Chemical Spray is what the poster said. You could find copies pasted to janky fences or stapled above urinals at the dive bars of east Vancouver.

Weaponized State we’re supposed to headline but backed out a few weeks before the event because Jo and Torrance got into an altercation in the back garden at the Orange House during an after hours rager where we’d called in auxiliary supplies from local independent delivery services that did exclusive alley drops and only took cash.

Nobody can remember what the fight was about but several staked tomato plants were victimized and the red treacle on Jo and Torrance’s hands and cheeks made it all seem horrifyingly violent at the time.

Not enough horror to stop the party but enough to be briefly shocked.

Jo holds a deep grudge and Torrance booked town to stay with some friends in the valley and so Weaponized State went on hiatus for several months and then abruptly ended when Torrance left town permanently. Moved to the interior and enrolled in a music therapy course and turned from amateur to professional dirtbag.

Fine, whatever.

Torrance was the weakest part of that band and Jo was always better solo. The loneliness that she expressed when she played alone, a dark star in the white wedge of the stage light, was her power. Sucking eyeballs and ears into a roiling abyss. She once did an entire set at 1067 with just a triangle. Songs we’d never heard before, weird lyrics of haunted dreams. And the chime of the triangle as we sat in total silence on the distressed couches in that illegal space.

Image @kat_noonan