Last year, guitarist Mark McGuire stepped away from the busy production schedule of cosmic drone-rockers Emeralds to craft Living With Yourself, a fine and overlooked album that drew on autobiographical source material. It may have been the first time most people had considered McGuire in a solo context, but he'd actually been equally busy in that realm as well, issuing tracks on an assortment of limited CD-Rs, cassettes, and compilations. A Young Person's Guide gathers highlights from these small-run releases, offering a nice overview of what McGuire's solo work is all about.
Tracks here generally fall into one of a few different types. There are the spacey meditations where single notes are plucked to create a hypnotic effect that nods to minimalism and kosmische explorations that bring to mind in particular the landmark Inventions for Electric Guitar by Ash Ra Tempel's Manuel Göttsching. On tracks like "Radio Flyer", "Explosion Alarm", and "The Marfa Lights", McGuire uses bits of delay and overlapping patterns of cleanly picked tones to create music that feels weightless and airy and meditative.
Other tracks use harder strumming and looping chords and veer closer to the world of rock proper, and here the focal point is exploring the possibilities of a single chord progression. "Dream Team" has a steady pulse, harmonized leads bathed in distortion, and distant vocals, and the way it builds and gradually shifts creates a mood of uplift and even triumph. "The Path Lined With Colorful Stones" takes an even simpler strummed pattern as its base, which allows McGuire to spin out tendrils of melody on top that feel loose and ragged but without clear direction but that nonetheless manage to resonate. Here, McGuire's music feels partway between the thick, mantra-like approach of Roy Montgomery and the fluid melodicism of the Durutti Column's Vini Reilly. And then there are bright, pastoral instrumentals like "Icy Windows" and "Time Is Flying", which have a loose grounding in folk but take on a more mesmerizing quality through repetition.
Tracks vary in length from interludes that last barely over a minute to the 17-minute "Dream Team". Many of the pieces fall into spaces between these loose categories, but taken together, over the course of two packed CDs, they give a good idea of the range of McGuire's interests. It's not an especially wide range, but it is executed very well. He knows where he wants to go and what it takes to get there.
Is almost two and a half hours of guitar-based, mostly instrumental music overkill? It's really not. The way McGuire's music functions, I don't detect an upper limit for when it might grow tiresome. The longest tracks would also work fine even if they were longer; it's music that strives for endlessness in the best possible way. So this is the kind of record you can just put on at moderate volume when you are doing things and it fills a room nicely with warm, inviting sound. And then, when you're in the mood for more intense engagement, you can add another quarter-turn to the volume knob and take in the full force of McGuire's arrangements. The music shows remarkable flexibility.
Part of it is up to the fact that dynamic range is limited. There's little that is jarring or surprising. This is music that wants to wrap you in an affectionate embrace and serve as a companion, to either some other activity or to a more focused journey into of the further reaches of consciousness. And where the dream-driven music scenes that McGuire sometimes finds himself lumped in with can feel like a bummed-out retro hangover, this music is almost uniformly positive and optimistic, seeming to celebrate the restorative possibilities of elemental chord changes, repetition, and carefully sculpted textures. It's music that wants to find its way into your life and do some good, and I can't think of any good reason to resist it.
