Wyrd Daze

Hey y’all, my name’s Jeremy Hunt and I’m a musician from North Carolina. I’m involved in several projects at any given time. My main one is an experimental noise rock band called QOHELETH, where I play guitar, bass, piano and yell alongside two of my best friends, Mike Strickler and Caiden Withey. I have an weird solo project called Aint Pancakes.

My most recent project, which just released it’s first full-length album on February 23rd via Cruel Nature Records, is called H.R. Giger Counter. It’s a direct spin-off from QOHELETH’s second album and a collab with my buddy Andrew Gladstone-Heighton from the UK. Andrew’s music projects include waheela and Radio Free Ul-quoma. I love both of them and if you’re a fan of experimental/heavy music, you need to check ‘em out ASAP.

H.R. Giger Counter is one of four bands that exist in the future of QOHELETH’s Black Kite Broadcasts album. That record is a concept album about a radio broadcast that we intercepted from the future, one where all of nature decided to overthrow major portions of humanity, exhausted from centuries of humans mistreating this planet that we all share.

As part of the writing process, Mike and I created a bunch of fake future bands that would be played on the radio station that we accidentally stumbled across during a band practice. H.R. Giger Counter is one of those entities, so to continue unraveling the lore of this story, I thought it would be a blast to create a full album of their music, giving listeners another corner of this future world to explore. It’s one of four such albums that we’ve been releasing over the past year or so.

At any rate, you can find me on Instagram at @jehu and on TikTok at @jehuthehunt. Andrew is at @rustpunks on IG. I also run a small DIY music label called Philip K. Discs:
https://philipkdiscs.bandcamp.com.

Where did you come from and where are you going?

Well, how much time do we have? I was born in Germany on a U.S Army based, raised mostly in the South, spent a few years in high school living in France, moved back to the South for college, got married, started a family, worked a few jobs and then moved to California to get my masters and PhD degrees…and now I’m back in the South again.

As to where I’m going, that’s way more open-ended. As long as I’ve got my wife and our five daughters with me, I’m content to be wherever they are. Creatively speaking, I’m always working on something new, whether it’s music, video editing, or currently wrapping up edits on my first book, set to be published later this year. It focuses on noise rock and theology, and I’m hoping to eventually start teaching theology and cultural studies full-time.

What preoccupies your mind these days?

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s my family and community first and then my creative projects and circles. Our kids range in age from 15 to 7, so we’re constantly having conversations about what they’re encountering in school, with their friends, and just the the tumultuous time that the teen years and childhood can be. If you know anything about the U.S., you probably already know that we do a terrible job of caring for our own children, thanks to loose gun laws, targeting trans and gay kids (and wasting so many resources doing so), and not funding teachers and education properly. I’d want to be involved closely in each of their lives regardless of what’s going on in our society, but this stuff and so much more has me especially tuned in to what they’re experiencing.

Name a favourite taste, touch, sound, sight and smell.

For taste, this is tough. My wife’s an incredible cook and baker, so I’m really spoiled when it comes to home cooked meals. I’ll go with something she made this weekend. She has a recipe for biscuits that’s just fantastic. The perfect balance of salt with fluffy layers…they’re perfect for breakfast and taste good with butter and jam, bacon, eggs, and cheese, you name it.

One of my favorite touch sensations are the M.U.S.C.L.E. rubber mini figures I grew up with as a kid. I have friends that make their own original designs (the good dudes at Dead Bird Toys: https://www.deadbirdtoys.com) and I collect those now. I’ve also commissioned some original mini figures with them for various QOHELETH releases. I can’t quite explain what I love about the rubbery textures, except that I’ve always fidgeted when working or studying, and messing with something in my hands helps me stay focused and think through problems.

One of my favorite sounds is hearing my kids laugh and hang out with their friends. It can feel like a life of total chaos (and it’s probably a big influence on the sort of music I create), but I wouldn’t trade it for anything…even if I sometimes have to duck out to quiet part of the house to collect my thoughts and hear myself think, hahaha.

For sights, this is nearly impossible. I LOVE film and TV, so the analog look of things that I grew up with still captivates me. VHS tracking lines, static…but then I also love the area of the world where I live. Growing up in the South, it’s packed with a palette of greens that are so bright and vibrant. Plants and vegetation everywhere.

And for smells, see my favorite tastes. 😉

Describe one of your most vivid dreams or nightmares

I don’t always remember my dreams, but one stands out that I had a few weeks back. I think it was brought on, in part, by all the editing work that I’m doing on my noise rock manuscript. I have an entire chapter dedicated to Oxbow, and so I reached out to their lead singer, Eugene Robinson a few months back to obtain his permission to include some of his lyrics in that chapter of the book.

At any rate, I had a dream that somehow he and I met up in Europe, I guess while he was on tour? That part was fuzzy and vague, but basically the rest of the dream was a road trip where he and I cruised the European countrysides and became best buddies. I think there might have been a heist and/or a couple of fights involved too (us fighting other people), but it was hilarious and I remember having a blast. And then I woke up and laughing about how ridiculous the whole thing was.

Have you ever had an uncanny experience?

So I don’t know if this qualifies as uncanny through and through, but ever since my wife and I first met, we regularly have experiences in our relationship where we’re thinking about the exact same thing at the exact same time. It can be something completely mundane, like work or what we’re going to have for dinner that evening, or it’ll be about our friends, something someone said a week or two back… basically if it’s something we experienced together at some point, it’s fair game for this weird telepathy thing that our brains have going on. After nearly 20 years together, you’d think that we’d be used to it, but it still manages to shock and surprise me sometimes.

How does your sense of place affect the way you express yourself?

Very much so. I think one of our greatest needs as a species is to reconnect with the planet in genuine ways, literally interacting with the earth (sand, soil, water, plants, etc.). I grew up caring for yards in my neighborhood and I’ve always had a deep love for animals. I dreamed of being a zoologist as a kid (until I realized that I sucked at math and science, so that dream died pretty quickly thereafter).

I also tend to think of things operating at various wavelengths, including the spaces where I live and work. So when I write music and create, I try to chase sounds that feel like they belong…I don’t know that I always succeed, but that’s partly what I’m after.

Put another way: I feel like I’ve been marked by the heat and culture of both the South and the desert regions surrounding LA. That’s what I’m constantly attempting to channel in my music: a chaotic beauty, a dark and complicated past, and a hopeful future.

What has particularly touched or inspired you recently?

On a political/life front, I’ve been deeply impacted by Aaron Bushnell and his self-immolation. I have felt utterly powerless to do anything about the genocide in Gaza…and what he did is something that I’ll never forget. We exist in these systems of capitalistic dehumanization and greed, focusing on the bottom line, chewing up life and regurgitating death the world over. I despise Hamas for what they did to Israelis, and I despise the government of Israel for what they’re doing to Palestinians. And ultimately, I hate my own country’s leadership for funding it. It sounds like such a cliché, but I long so deeply for a day when an act like Aaron’s isn’t what’s needed to shock our governing class into some sort of milquetoast action.

And I realize that this will be quite the tone shift, but on the musical front, I just recently started tip-toeing into the world of Circle and their myriad associated projects, bands, etc. As a musician, it often feels like the only thing I can do is continue to create in defiance of the evil that surrounds us. Everything feels absurd, so why not fight violence with creation? Circle seems like a wellspring of that sort of relentless creativity, so I’m stoked to spend a lot more time with them as I fully explore their discography.

Tell us a good story, anecdote or joke.

Okay so stay with me on this one…

I come from a long line of men in my family tree who served in the U.S. Army, dating back several wars and generations. One of my great-grandfathers was a brigadier general during WWII and he wrote multiple manuals for the infantry and their strategies. Another ancestor, a great-uncle, also fought in WWII as a fighter pilot. He was shot down, captured by the Germans, and eventually escaped. All this to say, as a kid growing up, I assumed that I would also serve in the Army.

So when I was in high school, my dad (who also served) received an invite to an event at West Point (the U.S military academy) in honor of Coach Mike Krzyzewski (also known as Coach K). If you don’t recognize that name, the main thing you need to know about Coach K is that he’s a legendary college basketball coach here in the States. He coached the Duke University men’s basketball team for over 40 years and coached multiple Olympic teams during that time span. And as luck would have it, he was also a West Point grad, and like my dad, resigned from the Army as a captain as he shifted to a civilian career.

At any rate, my dad gets this invite around the same time that I’m starting the process of applying to West Point, so he suggests that we make a road trip out of it. We’ll go to West Point, I’ll spend half a day on the base with a cadet, get the lay of the land, reconnect with old family friends, and then go to the banquet in honor of Coach K. Sounds like an airtight plan, right? Well as it turns out, once we get there and I go through the tour, I find out that asthma (which I’ve had since I was a kid) is a major disqualifier for admittance to the Academy, so that’s strike one. No military service for me, time to figure out what I’m going to do with my life aside from the “family work.”

And strike two? We go to the Coach K event, have a nice dinner, and as things are wrapping up, I tell my dad that I’m going to take the evening’s program up to Coach K to see if he wouldn’t mind signing it for me. I make my way up to his table where he’s talking to a small group of folks. Eventually I get up to him, introduce myself and ask for his signature. I mention that I’m Steve Hunt’s son. He goes, “Oh Steve! I haven’t talked to him in years! I’ll have to come up and catch up.”

It’s at this moment that I realized that we were not supposed to be there. I had heard so many of my dad’s stories about his time at West Point, his classmates, etc. And not one of them involved Coach K. I played and loved basketball, watched it all the time growing up. My dad coached some of my teams…and at no point did he ever mention knowing Coach K. I guess there were multiple Steve Hunts who attended at West Point, but I knew immediately that something was up and that the wrong Steve Hunt got the invitation.

So I make a beeline back to our table and quickly tell my dad, hey, we need to get out of here, NOW. Coach K thinks he knows you and he’s going to be really disappointed/mad when he finds out that a couple of imposters made their way into this banquet.

And that’s exactly what we did. I realize now, all these years later, that it might have been even funnier to actually introduce Coach K to my dad and they probably would have just laughed about the mix-up together…but in my mind, I was just imagining court martials and lectures about duty, honor, and country.