
Mark McGuire 's new album, Guitar Meditations Vol. II , is two minutes shy of a hundred and twenty minutes of stunningly beautiful electric guitar music. Maybe it if was his first release in a year or two, Guitar Meditations ... might seem like an event, but with at least five or six solo records released in the past three years, it just seems like more of a good thing. With at least two songs clocking in at around thirty minutes, you might think Guitar Meditations ... would get boring, but it never does. "Beneath [...]

Found this awesome cassette collaboration between Etienne Pierre Duguay of Real Estate and Mark McGuire of Emeralds lurking in a ectoplasm-splattered corner of the internet, entitled From The Swamp Rot Rises My Babies Dreams. Shimmering guitar tones and new age synth pads seep out through muslin-wrapped fuzz, for 10 shamelessly blissed-out droning minutes at a time. Here's Transmutations, cut out and amplified from the much longer tape side. You could maybe ask this man or this man for a copy, but let's face it, they're probably all gone, so go here for the whole [...]

For my apologies / frame of mind when making the list - check the mentions post : Some notes : Hate to sound like a white suburban teenager, but the hazy lo-fi sounds of Matt Mondanile & friends has been the soundtrack to this year. Beware! too much of this will make you think that you live in a two storey prefab with American siding, have a bunch of lazy teenagers in trucker caps as friends and make love to sleazy girls at the beach. Which is quite the contrary to what [...]

Mark McGuire - Explosion Arm This is from an EP entitled Losing Sleep , a collection of hypnotic instrumental pieces recorded over the summer between the hours of 3am and 6am. But the stand out track is an epic live take where Mark McGuire (who is also a member of Emeralds) utilises a certain Pink Floyd guitar sound to build an extraordinary composition of loops and layers. Definitely one for those late night journeys. The CD-R was limited to a run of 60 copies and has since sold out, but be sure to visit McGuire's [...]

How do I even begin to measure how much ass Emerald's Mark McGuire kicked this year? Working under several different project names including Sun Watcher, Skyramps, and Peoples Parties, Mark quietly conquered the ambient underground in 2009. To combat sleeplessness, tour schedules, and boredom, he filled his four-track with buoyant, rhythmic meditations for guitar and tape with a deeply submerged pop sensibility. While varied stylistically, the handful of releases he put out this year are all anchored around his fluid and intuitive sense of song structure. If I had to pick one release that most accurately [...]

by christ it's been a noisy old month what with lightning bolt, entombed, little claw, shit and shine, factums, pelican, isis, gary war, billy bao, drunkdriver all cavorting around my damaged lugholes. therefore it's time for a break from all this distortion, this ugly racket, this howling and hollering, this mad spastic din. it's time for something clean, something linear, something harmonious. and that something is this rather soothing piece of acoustica from emeralds fella, mark mcguire. echoplexed or multitracked or both i dunno, but it's layered. not in the same huge orgasmic waves way emeralds build their [...]
How often am I going to have my mind blown by Ohio's Emeralds? I'd barely put it back together again following this year's What Happened (and the reissued Allegory of Allergies) before they'd launched another hypagogic exocet at my skull in the shape of this vinyl-only release on member Steve Hauschildt's Gneiss Things label. Guitarist [...]
okay let's rewind a year almost and pretend that, hey this's just come out. king tupou v is crowned as the 23rd monarch of tonga. there's a total solar eclipse. north korea declares sweden its enemy. somali pirates! barrack obama! hurricane gustav! bombs in baghdad! earthquake in china! the leader of malaysian opposition anwar ibrahim is [...]