DI32
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Cat#: DI32 Artist: Mark McGuire Title: Misunderstandings Date of Release: 10/11/2010 Edition Size: 300 (hand numbered w/gold decocolor) Materials: C30 (BASF chrome stock in imprinted red shell), 2-color screen print by Mark Price on 100# French paper, gold foil adhesive label, soft polybox. Availability: Sold out at source. |
Description:
As he graces his first DI edition since 2007′s sterling Distractions, Mark McGuire is a jammer who no longer needs any introduction I can give him; the fingerprints in question are all over a knot of crucial units, including Skyramps (with Daniel Lopatin), Free Time (with Sam Goldberg), Sunwatcher (with Lambsbread’s Shane MacKenzie), and of course, Emeralds, to say nothing of a sprawling catalog of solo missives and the endless pluck of a host of pale imitators. It’s enough to give one the sense of McGuire as a contemporary answer to the itinterant Fripp of 1974-81, following a singular muse with brilliant insight and focus into the territory between experimental and popular musics, and doing so as part of a bustling encampment of contemporaries who have found themselves in the same place for the moment, each for their own reasons.
But seriously, underwater lakes are a real thing, and the beautifully zonked/plasticized guitar synth of side one’s title track is something like the sound of parking coyly beside one and tuning one’s radio to a frequency that causes a sparkling blue gel, flecked with seaweed, to stream from the speakers, while “Nothing Personal,” which stretches with precise, studied melancholy across the length of side two is more like the ensuing stroll down the boardwalk, a pastiche of Brighton Beach and Bedknobs and Broomsticks constructed from victorian automata, in which pairs of mechanical fish with gleaming, uncorroded scales and oppressively heavy fur coats trudge, fin in fin, against the current. Halfway in, a radiant, cutting shaft of light offers a sudden and rapturous glimpse of all those gears turning at once without adding up to anything approaching a clock. Instead, there’s an unbounded, oceanic sense of tiny variations rippling outward in all directions from every event, of time as the horizon and undoing of any attempt at individual perspective. It’s an ego solvent that owes as much to, say, Music for Eighteen Musicians, or Schlingen-Blangen as it does to Inventions for Electric Guitar or I Advance Masked and a perfect example of McGuire’s solo work at its most burnished and compelling.
Notes:
Synthesized electric guitar recorded winter/spring 2010 at home.
(Please note that the description is incorrect insofar as Mark also appears on Dlx Othr’s Nineties Youth Experience, which was released well after Distractions. Our apologies for the oversight.)
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