Mark McGuire w/ Jenny Hval, Koen Holtkamp, Idpyramid
The Mill — Tuesday, April 1 at 8 p.m. ($12)
The Mission Creek Festival kicks off tonight with an incredible set of opportunities to get social at FilmScene, get schooled by Laurie Anderson at the Englert, get rocked by Alex Body and Warpaint at Gabe’s, and get rewired by Koen Holtkamp, Jenny Hval and Mark McGuire at the Mill.
McGuire’s visit is perfectly timed following the release of his solo album (and companion text) Along The Way. The experimental guitarist and composer first gained prominence as part of the Cleveland collective Emeralds, who have been credited with helping create a place for melodic, meditative jams in noise communities across the underground.
McGuire started playing guitar at age nine, spent time in punk and hardcore bands, but grew out of that by the end of high school. It was then that he and his friends shifted their focus and started making unique statements as Emeralds.
His most recent solo work, Along The Way is a long piece that reflects McGuire’s freedom to explore and features his virtuosic guitar shredding while maintaining a deliberative, meditative vibe through all of its twists and turns.
I spoke with him last week, the day after a show in Denver in which he opened for the War on Drugs:
First, congratulations on Along The Way, it’s a really cool piece. I’m curious, when you listed to it for the first time, were you ceremonious about it?
It was weird because it was coming together for such a long time, and just refining it took so long. When it was finally ready I had to take a real deep breath and step back from it. I finished it over a year ago. It was out in Japan and waiting to come out everywhere else in the world. I was antsy and getting butterflies, but once it finally came out on Dead Oceans and I had the copies and the full text, it was a special day.
It was a long time coming and yeah, I was really proud. I put a lot of work into the album. It kind of may seem like it’s trying to make some sweeping heavy statement, musically, or even quasi philosophically, but I really look at Along The Way as the beginning of a next phase, because now I look at everything in a totally new light. Dead Oceans has been so welcoming and creating great opportunities. Being able to work with people that are there to help me — it just begins to open your mind so much more. So the next couple of records we’re going to do, we’re going to hone in on what’s going to come later. It’s just like in the story, Along The Way, you get to the end and it’s like oh wait, it’s just the beginning.
What would be the ideal scenario to listen to the record?
I don’t know, I hear a bunch of stuff from friends that like to listen to it while driving, or around the house, or to meditate with it with headphones. I didn’t want it to be too specifically, you know, “one way.” I wanted it to move around. So I think a lot of parts of the record, if you are on a long walk on a cold night, there are certain parts you would really connect with that.
Other parts, if you are sitting around in a warm room with your friends and everyone’s feeling good, that could be the key to understanding where other parts of the album are coming from. And also just the interpretive quality of the music. Even though there are some lyrics and some meaning behind the lyrics that are behind the instrumental music, it is instrumental music and it’s mixed in a way so that you don’t have to listen to the words if you don’t want to. You can decide what it means to you. That’s kind of one of the main themes in it, anyway, that whatever you come across in life, whenever you are even looking at your own life, too, to really make whatever you want out of it, and don’t care or listen to whatever anyone puts in front of you unless you buy it as reality. It’s the same with my record. You don’t have to listen to me, or anything I have to say about it at all. You will understand what the music means to you and that’s all that it can do, ultimately.
Did the writing of the companion text feel like a good process? Could you see yourself working on a book?
I was kind of writing it at first as these scenes to a fake movie. The emotional mood of what it would sound like was guiding the story. I’m not really a writer but I do like writing a lot. So just this exercise of putting together the album, it was cool to simultaneously create these musical ideas that would go along with text to go along with music that had already started. It was just an interesting process to see how much transformation it went through.
How was your Japan tour? What do you think we can learn from Japan in terms of the way live music happens over there?
In Japan I felt a very strong sense of appreciation from the fans, even on an individual level. Almost everyone sticks around and buys a record and takes a picture. That’s pretty special in itself. But promoters are also working together to make sure there’s a big flow of artists coming through. They try not to step on each others toes, and just make sure everything’s going smooth for everyone’s benefit. In the states, there’s just so much happening here people just focused on trying to book shows, it’s easy to get lost in the sea of, almost just TV static. Here people are just so busy trying to get tours done, I think mostly even just due to the size of the country.
What’s your relationship with the internet like?
It’s a strange one. The internet’s such a powerful tool that you can’t deny the power of it or its usefulness. I use the internet every single day, for many different reasons. But there’s obviously the side of it that’s just the giant never-ending distraction that’s almost completely self-defeating. The internet is one of the keys we have to our true freedom — the freedom of not really needing a higher authority to teach us what we need to know. If you really want it you can go out and learn anything you need to know if you have a computer, you just have to put yourself in that subject, but that’s a multifaceted question.
Your blog talks a lot about rebellion — can you talk about the relationship between knowledge and rebellion?
Rebellion — the wider understanding of what rebellion is — is a weird thing in itself because it’s almost a flip side to that subservience to a father figure or authority or whatever. It’s the same kind of impulse — the impulse to go along with the machine or to, you know, rage against the machine or whatever. Once you start taking knowledge for what you believe to be true and stop caring about what you’ve been conditioned to think and start taking things in and decide how you feel about things for yourself, there’s a natural rebellion that happens because you instantly start to realize that you’ve just basically been lied to.
Almost anything that you can look at — I think there’s a very natural tendency once you start to open your mind up to the true nature of just staying open to reality no matter what you’d like it to be, taking in knowledge and following it wherever it goes, maybe something you wanted to be true and it wasn’t… You just have to take that as it comes. But once you start to see that, you see so much that’s happening around you is just put there to see if you are paying attention enough to notice that it’s a total lie, and there’s a real natural tendency to want to rebel against a lot of forms of what that might manifest itself as.
How does making music advance the cause of self discovery?
Any kind of self expression, whatever form it might take. If you strip it all away to make something yourself. If you put creative energy into something as a true expression of who you are. That’s self discovery in itself. You are looking into this infinite unknown, so what you decide to manifest and put your energy into, if you are being honest with yourself, it is very much is a window into your soul. I grew up playing guitar, then kind of stopped, then kind of still was doing it but had these ambivalent feelings. But I started again and started rediscovering the guitar and what it meant to me, and kind of applying the things I had learned from experimental music, and what that meant to me, and that started to sound like something that had been in the works for a long time but something I really had no clue about.… so harnessing that, and then once you choose to believe in yourself and believe what you are doing that gives it even more power, so the self-discovery can be a feedback loop and you can achieve anything you want, really.
So, between your own feedback and being focused on your own ideas and that infinite realm of possibilities, as you are layering compositions, what’s guiding all of those decisions in the smallest of ways and the biggest of ways?
Well, if you asked me that like a couple of years ago when I was still basically using all guitar for my sound, I would say that I had all these sounds and ideas I was composing for an orchestra, but with just guitar, so I would try to emulate all of those other sounds with guitar. We used to do these things at Emeralds practice where John and Steve would kind of play synth sounds, then I would try to mimic them on guitar. But now I have been using synthesizer and expanded the pallet, I can wrangle up any kind of sound. So that kind of changes the game. What do I want to do? Let’s do it… A lot of it, it really is, even right now talking to you is kind of this self discovery thing. But once I’ve introduced these other elements, it’s about trying to keep a balance, keep a voice without getting lost in all these sounds that might dilute the music, but even that might not be true, haha.
How has going solo affected your progression? What do you take with you from your time as a band?
Well, with going solo, I’ve been playing solo since when we started Emeralds and even before that, and I think the going solo thing is just us deciding over the last couple of years that we weren’t going to have this kind of underlying thing tying us together anymore. I had been living out of Cleveland for a few years, those guys were still there, and our lives’ paths were just diverging. That’s just a natural thing that happens. It didn’t really mean anything. Once you take a deep breath and let it happen and let that time pass, now I can talk with those guys about things and I feel like there’s just much more clear communication between us, now that there’s not this thing that people are expecting.
Before, this was just a weird band that we formed because we were feeling this way and that’s what we did. I take so much with me, it’s just the magic of life. John and I grew up playing guitar in shitty punk bands and once I got out of high school, that was not looking that promising. We felt like we were tearing down our reality. Before Emeralds we were using any kind of thing we could find as an audio source. And once you start doing that you realize every kind of sound is a music instrument. At that moment, it just felt right, but we had absolutely no technical understanding — or even aesthetically — of what we were diving into. We were aware of trends and getting into stuff gradually, but we had no idea.
I take so much from that. There’s never going to be anything like that in my life again, and I recognize the significance and magic of that. Even when I’m on stage now, that’s the primal feeling of what was happening with Emeralds. But just because we are not a working band doesn’t mean we’re never going to play music together, like the world has heard the last from Emeralds… I just know all possibilities are still open.
That’s exciting. Pardon my ignorance if there is a well documented connection here, but have you ever crossed paths with Night-People, the label Shawn Reed used to run out of Iowa City?
Yeah, actually the band before Emeralds — Fancelions — we played with Raccoo-oo-oon, and that was the last show we played before we became Emeralds, it was back in 2006. And we were doing the first Emeralds tour about a year later and it was literally like every night we were running into each other in a new city. They are good guys.
Night-People created a really nurturing environment for so many waves of people in Iowa City, how to record and book shows… Were there people in Cleveland that guided you along?
There certainly were people in Cleveland, but there’s an outlying community in the midwest — Detroit, Ann Arbor, Lansing, Ypsilanti, down in Columbus, Cincinnati … and lots of bands coming out of New York coming through. We were really lucky because we happened to be getting into stuff that was on like Hanson Records, and kind of this midwest noise and experimental stuff, and we were just kind of at these shows and hanging out and wound up releasing stuff on Hanson. So, people like Aaron Dillaway, John Olson [note: Dillaway and Olson play in Wolf Eyes, also Mission Creek 2014 performers], and even Thurston Moore, you know, he was coming to really early Emeralds shows and people were sticking their necks out saying “these guys are cool.” And we were literally just these kids that kind of showed up, you know, with a green smoke cloud and whatever. There were a lot of different people. Especially in Ohio, this band Lambsbread, they had a farm in Delaware, Ohio, that they used to throw shows at that, you know, people are going to say they can’t believe they saw these bands in a house with like 10 people in it. We couldn’t even believe we saw them, let alone we got to hang out in a basement with them.
We were still young enough, that was a fresh experience. I mean, we were jaded by our childhood experiences with, you know, what we thought was this independent music scene, but we were really lucky. It seemed really meant to be that we were around these people that we really looked up to. I think it’s the same in Iowa City. I can’t say this for sure, but there were elements of things that were going on around [Nigh-People] that you could see what was going on, but they kind of took it and made it into their own thing. With Emeralds we were playing with bands doing harsher more intense kinds of things and we were doing something mellower, and that’s just where we were at. So, having that balance I think is really cool, and those guys are cool — you have to give respect to those that have helped you along the path.
Your Facebook says Mark McGuire Music began on March 1, 2006. What’s significant about that date?
I think that was the first time I decided to record some live guitar jams, and it was around the time our friends in the band Nautical Almanac — their studio space, Tarantula Hill had caught fire. So I decided to make some CDRs of the recording and to try and raise some money, which didn’t do very much, I probably raised $3, but that’s the first time a committed solo guitar to a recording, so I consider that the date that part of the mission sort of began.
Was last night’s show with War on Drugs part of a tour? Does playing with them ever make you tempted to start a new phase in that mission, where you join more of a straight up rock band?
I played with them last night, it was just the one show. But I’ve been playing with Afghan Whigs, we played a show for the Sub Pop label last summer. That was the first time I’d played with a drummer and a rock band at that type of show since I was like 18. It was really fun, that raw feeling of having all the amps and the sound flying around. There are a lot of obviously different setups and sonic environments that can come to you from going to all kinds of experimental and electronic shows.
But the experience of playing with a band is pretty special. There’s something about the drums and the acoustic quality of instruments where there’s this frequency that’s bringing people together. I’m going to try and do some shows with those guys this year. I started to revisit stuff that I listened to as a kid. It’s fun to like, play rock and roll music and kickass. Ultimately like last night when I played with the War on Drugs, I feel like I’m playing with my band. Whatever guise it takes. I am doing my rock band. That’s the core of my musical being, the first thing you heard about ever was rock and roll. So I can’t help but go crazy and wind up sweating like 10 pounds because I still have that inner child that wants to head bang and rock out. I can’t shake it and I don’t want to because that’s why I play music — because I’m still the nine year-old kid that got a guitar and had his whole world change. I still feel that magic when I play.
On the album you play guitar, bass, live percussion, piano, keyboards, synthesizers, drum machines, samples of santur and mandolin… Your set that you are taking on the road — are you going to have all those instruments and gear with you on stage?
No, that’d be cool, but even trying to do all that — there’s all those instruments on the record but there’s no way I could be up there trying to wrangle all that stuff, so I kind of recomposed and rearranged everything to do live versions of them. It was cool that the record took longer than I expected for it to come out, because I spent a lot of the year working out the kinks of how I would do Along The Way live, and I finally kind of have a set up where I feel comfortable.
[I’m] still just playing guitar, and then I have all my drum and synth sounds in like a drum machine sampler sequencer that I can play live, so it’s not just hitting play on a backing track but it’s something I can still loop and shape live, the same way I do with guitar. The songs are the same in essence as what they are on the album, but the way they are presented and pulled off is a little different. Now I want a recorded version of the live songs because they’re kind of a thing in themselves, they’ve taken on a life of their own.
The Mill is a great sounding room. If you want we can set up a mic and send it over to you.
Oh, that’d be really cool. Thanks!
Last question: We are putting together a bookshelf of recommendations from Mission Creek artists to do a giveaway at the end of the week. Can you think of a book you would recommend — one book that you think belongs on everybody’s bookshelf?
Something that belongs on everybody’s bookshelf, I don’t know any book. But if I could recommend a personal favorite of mine — one of my favorite novels is by a woman named Mabel Collins who was a theosophist from the late 19th century. She wrote a book called The Idyll of the White Lotus. It’s a really beautiful story about a child who lives in the countryside. It takes place in ancient Egypt, he goes into the city and starts to learn about the city life and it’s the psych-adventure of what this child goes through.
It’s about the ability to use a cult or some piece of information to try and build people up, or to use the same exact information to try and drag people down, and that battle between light and darkness that exists between most “spiritual beings.” Her philosophical books are really good, but that’s a book that I would really recommend.
