Posts tagged: Mark McGuire
Haunted Ghost’s Chanson du Jour :: completely lost edition
Mark McGuire :: Get Lost
I am a very intense enthusiast of the whole Ohio , especially when it comes to the Emeralds camp (Mark McGuire, Jon Elliot, Steve Hauschildt, and fringe crew like Radio People’s Sam Goldberg, Hanson Records’ Aaron Dilloway, Trouble Books, and Cylindrical Habitat Modules’ Julian Gulyas) so when I saw the Editions Mego is going to release a new Mark McGuire album, Get Lost, in a month, needless to say, I was stoked. Upon listening to it, I was awash with the same wispy and emotional affectation that I experienced the first time I heard Goes By… off the 2010 Emeralds full length Does it Look Like I’m Here? The track builds slowly with McGuire’s signature guitar sensibilities and a shimmering synth dancing around in the background, but then a bit over halfway comes the classic distorted guitar static and beautiful acoustic strumming that conjure, as McGuire describes “the spirit of the summer night sky.” Listening to this for some reason recalls the memory of when I was a young child moving from California to North Carolina, sitting on the trunk of my parent’s car in the middle of the desert, crying from fear of change and looking up at the falling stars like smears of light streaking through the water of my tears. Powerful, raw, emotional, massive, beautiful. This is going to be one of those albums…
Pre-order at Editions Mego or wait for the more nicely priced domestic order on Forced Exposure or Experimedia.
Haunted Ghost’s Chanson du Jour :: beauty be together edition
Mark McGuire & Trouble Books :: Song for Reinier Lucassen’s Sphinx
Two great forces of the Ohio music scene collide with this sprawling, beautiful work of electronic drone songs and soundscapes. Trouble Books is a couple who started their label Bark & Hiss not too long ago and have since put out two full length albums and an EP. They play slow, entrenching, and melodic synth ingrained music, the kind of stuff for summer storms and rainy beaches. Mark McGuire is one of my current and possibly all time favorite musicians. He lends his soaring, looped guitars to the brilliant Cleveland based trio Emeralds and has been releasing myriad solo albums for the past 6 years. His influence on this collaboration is incredibly dynamic and creates a huge sonic atmosphere more full and sustained than Trouble Books’ earlier releases while more controlled and melodic than a lot of his Emeralds and solo works. The single off the album, is an ode to the Dutch painter Reinier Lucassen’s work show above, the Sphinx, was one of his less known though still influential pieces from the figurative expressionism he helped to create. Perhaps that is why the song is so beautifully ethereal and a bit surreal, not completely immersed in reality yet not entirely out of reach.
