Mark McGuire’s Progressive Reinvention in Echoes Podcast

Mark McGuire’s Prog-Rock Roots and Metaphysical Designs
in Echoes Podcast

If you thought Toto had taken over Mike Oldfield’s body on his recent album, Man on the Rocks, then you should hear Mark McGuire’s Along the Way.  Every time I put it on I feel like I’m taking a trip into the future via my past.  Elements of the 70s progressive rock music I love from Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel, Mike Oldfield and Jade Warrior emerge in his music.  But Mark McGuire isn’t recreating this sound so much as reinventing it for his own vocabulary.   He was formerly in Emeralds, an electronic band with deep echoes of German space music but on his own, he’s made a statement recording that goes beyond that.  It was the Echoes CD of the Month for March and you can read a review and listen to tracks from it here.   He talks about it in Echoes Podcast.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club. and get Hans Christian’s Hidden Treasures, the May CD of the Month. You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time. You can do it all right here.

OR
Pick Up  TRANSMISSIONS:
THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

 

 

Mark McGuire Talks Music & Metaphysics on Echoes

A Grandchild of 70s Progressive Rock

Every time I put on Mark McGuire’s Along the Way I feel like I’m taking a trip into the future via my past.  Elements of the 70s progressive rock music I love from Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel, Mike Oldfield and Jade Warrior emerge in his music.  But Mark McGuire isn’t recreating this sound so much as reinventing it for his own vocabulary.   He was formerly in Emeralds, an electronic band with deep echoes of German space music but on his own, he’s made a statement recording that goes beyond that.  It was the Echoes CD of the Month for March and you can read a review and listen to tracks from it here.   He talks about it tonight on Echoes.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club.  Mark McGuire’s Along the Way is our March CD of the Month.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.   You can do it all right here.

OR
Pick Up  TRANSMISSIONS:
THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

Echoes Top 25 for March 2014

Progressive guitars, Serene Songs and Hang Drums Lead Echoes Top 25 for March

It’s no surprise that our March CD of the Month, Mark McGuire’s Along the Way, leads the Echoes Top 25.  Fans of Popol Vuh, Ashra and Mike Oldfield should be in prog-epic heaven with this album.  Hear Mark McGuire interviewed on Monday March 31.   Beck’s Morning Phase comes up next, a beautiful psychedelic tinged pastoral song-cycle from this popular, yet I think still underrated artist.  And James Hood returns to the Echoes Top 25, having previously spent some time here with his other recording persona, Moodswings.  His album of Hang meditations, Ceremony. sounds better the more I hear it. Fully half of the top 25 have never been on this list before.

ECHOES TOP 25 FOR MARCH 2014

1. Mark McGuire – Along the Way (Dead Oceans)
2. Beck– Morning Phase (Capital)
3. James Hood – Ceremony (Edible Sounds)
4. Tycho – Awake (Ghostly International)
5. Mary Fahl – Love & Gravity (Mary Fahl)
6. Luna – Luna (Domo Records)
7. Ane Brun – Songs 2003-2013 (Balloon Ranger Recordings)
8. Marissa Nadler – July (Sacred Bones)
9. Lyla Foy – Mirrors the Sky (Subpop Records)
10. Erothyme – Circadia (Erothyme)
11. Coldplay – Ghost Stories (Parlophone UK)
12. Davidge – Slo Light (The End Records)
13. Mree – Winterwell (Mree Music)
14. The Capsules – The Long Goodbye (Saint Marie Records)
15. Elbow – The Take Off and Landing of Everything (Concord Records)
16. Linnea Olsson – Ah! (Universal UK)
17. Bluetech – Spacehop Chronicles Vol. 1 (Native State Records)
18. Priscilla Ahn – This is Where We Are (SQE Music)
19. Ernesto Schnack – Worldbuilding (Ernesto Schnack)
20. The War on Drugs – Lost in the Dream (Secretly Canadian)
21. That That Revolves – Chasing Sunshine EP (Hungry Media)
22. Cinema 12 – Cinema 12 (Cinema 12)
23. Armon Jay – Everything’s Different Nothing’s Changed (Armon Jay)
24. Dawn Landes – Bluebird (Western Vinyl)
25. David Torn – That Awkward Moment (Varese Records)

 

 

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club.  Mark McGuire’s Along the Way is our March CD of the Month.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.   You can do it all right here.

Or Pick Up

TRANSMISSIONS: THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio. Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

 

21st Century Progressive Rock Opus from Mark McGuire

Mark McGuire Creates 21st Century Progressive Rock Opus for Echoes CD of the Month

Old fans of progressive rock and space music might be forgiven if listening to Mark McGuire’s Along the Way takes them back to about 1975, calling up music like Ash Ra Tempel’s Inventions for Electric Guitar, Popol Vuh’s Seligpreisung or Can’s Soon Over Babaluma. McGuire’s heavily layered guitars with delay-driven riffs, burning solos and expansive themes would have fit perfectly in those heady times.

McGuire was in a band called Emeralds, an electronic retro-space music trio who sound like stowaways in Tangerine Dream’s Berlin studio circa 1975. But Along the Way is something different and more personal.  McGuire has hinted at this in a series of little-heard solo recordings like Get Lost and A Young Person’s Guide, but Along the Way is the culmination of these  explorations: it’s a beautifully crafted album that shifts in mood and motion.

The intricate opening suite begins as a new age meditation of acoustic guitar, meandering synthesizer, chimes, and some Asian stringed instrument sounding like a koto or pipa. Those instruments are joined by a delayed electric guitar and before you know it, you’re washed into “Wonderland of Living Things.”  It’s a Mike Oldfield-like confluence of insistent groove, cycling melodies and increasingly insistent delayed guitar riffs.

References abound on the album, like the Popol Vuh-inspired guitar picking on “Arrival Begins the Next Departure” with a trio of guitar lines that spiral up into the ether like vapor trail minarets.  Many of McGuire’s songs are built on looping delay patterns similar to those Manuel Göttsching created on  Inventions for Electric Guitar in 1975. His intricate riffs shift subtly through a song in a minimalist sleight of hand.

In the best progressive rock tradition, McGuire has grouped his compositions into a series of suites with titles like “To All Present in the Hall of Learning” and “The Age of Revealing.”  There’s an 11-page densely-packed existential treatise that goes along with the record, and each track of this primarily instrumental album has philosophical concepts to go along with them.  The guitarist has said:

“This story is an odyssey through the vast, unknown regions of the mind…the endless unfolding of psychological landscapes, leading to perpetual discoveries and expansions, in a genuinely emergent and infinite world of worlds.”

You may not be thinking of that during the intricate, pastoral weave of “In Search of the Miraculous” or the brain-searing crescendo of “The Instinct,” which forms like the isokinetic structure of a Hoberman sphere, slowly expanding until it explodes in a five minute electric guitar meltdown.

Playing all the instruments himself, including several kinds of guitars, mandolin, synthesizers, percussion, piano and more, McGuire’s opus recalls Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells in its ambitions.  McGuire brings that concept into the 21^st century and like that album some 40 years ago, Along the Way left me breathless.

John Diliberto (((echoes)))
Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club.  Mark McGuire’s Along the Way is our March CD of the Month.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.   You can do it all right here.
OR
Pick Up  TRANSMISSIONS:
THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.

Guitar Splendor in Echoes Top 25

Erik Wøllo and Mark McGuire bring guitars back to Echoes Top 25

Erik Wøllo’s February CD of the Month, Timelines,  leads Echoes Top 25.  It’s a brilliant recording of layered guitar dreamscapes.  Following close behind is our soon-to-be March CD of the Month, Mark McGuire’s Progressive Rock epic, Along the Way.  You’ll be hearing more about this album soon.  No fewer than seven vocal albums populate the top ten slots including Priscilla Ahn’s This is Where We Are; Warpaint‘s self-titled album; Linnea Olsson’s cello songs, Ah!; the return of Aurah with  Summon the Sky; Gem Club’s hazy In Roses and Simon Emmerson’s Fresh Handmade Sound reinvention of The Beatles on A Hard Day’s Night Treatment.  That last one, sadly, is not actually out yet.  The rebroadcast of Pure Bathing Culture’s live set boosted their return to the top 25.  See the complete list below.

ECHOES FEBRUARY TOP 25

1. Erik Wollo – Timelines (Projekt Records)
2. Priscilla Ahn – This is Where We Are (SQE Music)
3. Linnea Olsson – Ah! (Universal UK)
4. Mark McGuire – Along the Way (Dead Oceans)
5. Fresh Handmade Collective – Fresh Handmade Sound: A Hard Day’s Night Treatment (Lush)
6. Krusseldorf – Fractal World (Krusseldorf)
7. Aurah – Summon the Sky (Very Music)
8. Warpaint – Warpaint (Rough Trade Us)
9. Gem Club – In Roses (Hardly Art)
10. Pure Bathing Culture – Moon Tide (Partisan Records)
11. Lost in the Trees – Past Life (ANTI Records)
12. Blow Up Hollywood – Blue Sky Blond (Blow Up Hollywood)
13. All India Radio – Fall Remixes (All India Radio)
14. Larkenlyre – Music of the Extraordinary Voyages (Cynelic Gast Music)
15. Kristin Hoffmann – The Human Compass (Starr Records)
16. Olivier Libaux – Uncovered Queens of the Stone Age (Music For Music Lovers)
17. Darkside – Psychic (Matador Records)
18. Tonight Sky – Tonight Sky (Tonight Sky)
19. Juliette Commagere – Human (Aeronaut Records)
20. Muriel Anderson – Nightlight Daylight (Muriel Anderson)
21. David Helpling & Jon Jenkins – Found (Spotted Peccary)
22. Bluetech – Spacehop Chronicles Vol. 1 (Native State Records)
23. James Hood – Ceremony (Edible Sounds)
24. Banco de Gaia – Maya (Disco Gecko Recordings)
25. Divine Matrix – Hydrosphere (AD Music)

John Diliberto (((echoes)))

Join the Echoes CD of the Month Club.  Erik Wøllo’s Timelines is our February CD of the Month.  You’ll get great CDs and help support Echoes at the same time.   You can do it all right here.

TRANSMISSIONS: THE ECHOES LIVING ROOM CONCERTS VOLUME 19

Join us on Facebook where you’ll get all the Echoes news so you won’t be left behind when Dead Can Dance appear on the show, Tangerine Dream tours or Brian Eno drops a new iPad album. Or Follow us on Twitter@echoesradio.

Now you can go Mobile with Echoes On-Line. Find out how you can listen to Echoes 24/7 wherever you are on your iPhone, iPad or Droid.