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- Mark McGuire: the antithesis of the axeman
Using delay, multitracked loops and lengthy repetition, the 24-year-old has created the antidote to the indulgent guitar solo
Claims for the greatness of guitarists are often badly skewed. Many seem to regard guitar playing in a similar way to skateboarding, that greatness is about isolated feats of technical brilliance (an idea which Guitar Hero taps into and perhaps slyly satirises). Therefore songwriting from the likes of Dragonforce, and to a lesser extent Van Halen, Queen, and Guns N' Roses is modular: guitar theatrics slotted into a framework, rather than folded into songs.
At the other end of the scale is Mark McGuire, not the most technically brilliant guitarist of his generation, but certainly one of the greatest. His playing, full of delay and multitracked loops that spiral for half an hour at a time, is the opposite of the high-fructose dexterity of synthetic prog-metal. It's soulful and enveloping; lulling patterns and skywriting melodies vie with sheets of anxious noise and electronic burbles.
His first widely available release, Living With Yourself, is out on October 1 on Editions Mego, and McGuire says it is "inspired by my family, the friends I've known the best throughout my life, and everything that has led me to where I am right now". He sounds like some gnarled Faheyesque character taking stock of his life, but McGuire is only 24 years old.
In that time though, he's created an improbably hefty catalogue: 32 solo records over the last three years, plus the excellent collaborative projects Skyramps and Silver Futures. That's not including the 37 releases with his band Emeralds, who have covered everything from pure noise on Solar Bridge to ravey synths and euphoric training-montage crescendos on their latest record, Does It Look Like I'm Here?
There are certainly clear influences on his playing – Manuel Göttsching's funky yet unmoored noodling; the serene pulse of Cluster, and of Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint – but what's especially striking, given his youth, is how much of an individual and complex sound he's forged from them.
He shares with other young experimental American guitarists, like Dustin Wong, Matt Mondanile, James Ferraro and Sam Meringue an awareness of the transcendent possibilities of both constant repetition and freeform meandering, as well as sheer track length. And like those guitarists, he reforms the pop music guitars of his 80s childhood into something half-remembered and strange, the delay effects recalling the cut-throat emotional barrage of The Edge, while the clean echo imitates the chrome croon of Don Henley's Boys of Summer (the Urtext for this new school of nostalgic guitarists).
His use of vocal samples is interesting too. On Now I'll Be The Fairest In The Land! from his cassette An Old Hag's Cackle Pt II, they're sinister: perhaps the ultimate psychotic episode in cinema (Jack Nicholson in The Shining) rubs up against perhaps the ultimate villain (the wicked witch in Snow White), as guitar lines scurry beneath. But on Living With Yourself, he uses old home recordings his dad made of him and his brother to deeply moving effect.
Indeed, the new record is winningly sentimental and sweet, and an excellent introduction to McGuire. The melody on Brain Storm (For Erin) is one of his most satisfying and resonant, while Brothers (For Matt) is a departure into the kind of benevolent grunge shreddings Teenage Fanclub and Yo La Tengo used to ply in their early years (and sometimes still do). And as the guitar lines wash over one another, dragging the past into the future, it's clear that Mark McGuire is already touched with true greatness. Here's to the next 71 records.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Переслать - New music: Duck Sauce – Barbra Streisand
The man behind Dizzee's Bonkers assembles a hipster cast to pay tribute to Hollywood's Funny Girl
Well, this is just plain weird. Duck Sauce are Kanye collaborator A-Trak and producer and DJ Armand Van Helden (known most recently for his work on Dizzee's Bonkers). This is the first single from their forthcoming debut album, a dubious ode to to the titular 68-year-old singer and actress (we're not sure how she'll feel about the breakdown half way through, complete with vocodered "so rough, Barbra, Barbra"). Whilst the song itself is an insanely catchy slice of disco house, it's the video that throws up the most WTF moments. Santigold, ?uestlove, Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig, Diplo, Pharrell, Kanye and others all make guest appearances, whilst a dodgy Streisand impersonator sails about in a tiny boat warbling about duck sauce. Deliciously odd.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: James Blake – I Only Know (What I Know Now)
The baby face of dubstep gets hypnotic with this sparse, piano-tinged track
22-year-old James Blake is the acceptable (baby) face of dubstep. He even appeared in a recent Telegraph profile in which his "USP" was that he was, er, tall (he's 6'5" in case you're making notes). To be fair, that was billed as only one of his selling points, the other being his way with a soulful melody, which is actually pretty spot on. So, while the brilliant recent EP, CMYK, manipulated treated vocal samples from huge R&B hits such as Caught Out There and Try Again into completely different shapes, his forthcoming Klavierwerke EP finds him utilising his piano playing skills as well as showing off his plaintive vocals. I Only Know (What I Know Now) is all sparse chords, hisses of static and clipped vocal samples that somehow coalesce into a deceptively hypnotic five minutes.
Klavierwerke is out now on vinyl and via download on 10 Octoberguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Ask the indie professor: Why have audiences stopped dancing?
What happened to all the moshing at indie shows? The indie professor reckons it's down to people protecting their iPhones ...
I grew up on a diet of live gigs around the north-west – the Stone Roses, the Happy Mondays, the Fall, New Order, etc. The gigs were boisterous, friendly and fun and there was generally a feeling of people really getting into it. Fast forward to Built to Spill in London a couple of years ago and I felt like I was the only person dancing or expressing any emotion at all. Everyone stood stock still! At a gig by Cat Power I saw a girl given a hard time because she was dancing. Has indie changed? Has overexposure and/or a generational shift led to more "stiff" crowds? Have squares infiltrated our scene?
Steve Potter, via email
While not all audience members do the same things at shows, there has been significant evolution in crowd behaviour at gigs. Activities have always differed depending on where you place yourself in a venue. You can push and bump people near the front of the stage, but if you did that in the back you would get thrown out. Audience behaviour is one of the areas you can clearly see dramatic differences between genres. For instance, where indie venues have clear regions of activity and inactivity, dance has been characterised by movement across an entire venue. And where metal has its headbangers, indie fans have tended to throw their heads from side to side.
Here is a brief history of dancing at gigs:
From punk in the UK you get pogoing, which eventually morphs into slam dancing and moshing. Punk blows up in America and moshing becomes more stylised, with a circling chicken dance. Americans add stagediving. Initially viewed as obliterating the distinction between audience and performer, this is eventually seen as grandstanding. Stage-diving comes back to England, but punk is dead so it's the Goths who stagedive. Of course, in order to get back on your own two feet when you stagedive, you have to ride over fellow audience members to get to the less dense areas of the crowd. Thus, crowdsurfing develops.
They co-exist for a while in the post-punk landscape, but eventually stage-diving is rejected. After all, it's hard to get up to the stage while holding your arms aloft in some Rocky pose without looking like a narcissist. Crowdsurfing takes firm hold despite the protests of the fans near the front who dislike people rolling over them and the fans behind them who complain that crowdsurfers weren't listening to the music properly. However, in the early-to-mid noughties, many audiences stopped dancing at shows. This lack of movement was initially more characteristic of American gigs, but is now more common in the UK as well.
Currently, it is fairly typical to go to a show with an entirely "stiff" audience (although at punk shows audience members still do exactly the same things they did 30 years ago). For someone used to dancing at gigs, it's hard to not to find this boring and perhaps even painful. A mild toe-tap seems a sorry replacement for the cathartic physical exertion of "people getting into it" or even the thrill of being picked up by a stranger after you've fallen on your face.
One interesting thing is that the increase in stiff crowds runs parallel to the rise of mobile phones at shows. After all, it's hard to dance when you're concentrating on tweeting, taking pictures or recording the show. It's possible that the crowd are not dancing to protect their mobiles; the risks of going wild are not just to your life and limb but to your connectivity. You certainly can't tweet "I'm crowd surfing" as it would be too difficult, while tweeting "I crowd surfed" is so two minutes ago.
Regardless, the motionless body is now the staple of gigs. I speculate that this is what is behind the recent spate of injuries to musicians stagediving. With a different audience unprepared for previous modalities of gig behaviour, their instincts are to avoid people diving from the stage. For a good number of contemporary indie fans, they have no idea how to act beyond the most basic instinct: get the hell out of the way!
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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