Mark McGuire was on a legendary hot streak at the end of the aughts. Between 2006 and 2010, the Cleveland-based guitarist / composer built a catalog of solo work that showcased his kosmische-inflected guitar excursions in lengthy loop-based live takes that grew denser and more sophisticated with each subsequent small-edition release. McGuire’s trio Emeralds with John Elliott and Steve Hauschildt were even more prolific during this stretch of years, gradually ascending to their place as a torch-bearing act of the US underground as they released their own couple dozen tapes, CDrs, and LPs on labels including Editions Mego, Hanson Records, No Fun, and Ecstatic Peace!. Along with friends and contemporaries such as The Skaters (James Ferraro and Spencer Clark), Wolf Eyes, and Oneohtrix Point Never, Emeralds came to define a new strain of exploratory experimental music whose influence still reverberates with the freaks who aspire to run their own labels and pour out a stream of mind-expanding releases today.

Evocative and transfixing in their synth and guitar-based instrumental odysseys, Emeralds combined the ethos of the noise and drone scenes bubbling across America with increasingly melodic and ornate song structures indebted to the Berlin School of synthesis that had developed years before any of them were born. When the trio breached into wider public consciousness in 2010 with acclaimed albums like What Happened and Does It Look Like I’m Here?, it felt like a major upheaval in the trajectory of DIY culture, a bellwether for the following decade’s increasing fascination with ambient music, electronics, synthesis, and improvisation — all of which might tempt a budding musician today with the same intensity as the tenets of the underground punk scene did in the mind of a would-be acolyte in the 1980s.



In 2009, Mark McGuire released the album A Pocket Full of Rain (named after a line in Prefab Sprout’s “Green Isaac”) as a double cassette on the Ohio-based tape label Pizza Night, and followed it shortly with a CDr edition of the album on his own in-house label Wagon. Though any McGuire release from around this period is worthy of reappraisal over a decade later, A Pocket Full of Rain feels like a particularly overlooked classic in McGuire’s catalog owing to its epic scope and confident construction, only captured originally in those tiny physical editions.

Ryley Walker’s Husky Pants Records brings the album back to the surface, gathering the hour-long program into a double LP remastered by Jack Callahan and presented with new, expanded artwork and packaging by McGuire himself. McGuire acknowledges this early portion of his catalog, which yielded somewhere around two dozen releases mostly issued on Wagon, as a discrete branch defined by a more improvised style and a “first thought, best thought” mentality when it came to finalizing and presenting his sessions. He points to A Pocket Full of Rain specifically as the end of its era, a cut-off point before his work from 2010 and beyond that highlighted more conventional song formats, deliberate composition, overdubbing, and his own vocal performances (as seen on his LPs released through Editions Mego).

In 2009 and the years before, McGuire recorded 20+ minute long improvised takes and chopped them down as-is into the final incarnations that appeared on his albums. He compares his process in this period to a mutated form of jazz, with one guitar loop swirling throughout each session as a foundation akin to the head melody in a jazz take. Over that bedrock, he found himself free to spiral off into any direction, sometimes settling into riff structures that he would loop and build on top of his starting point, sometimes soloing as a lead voice over what had accumulated so far. A Pocket Full of Rain is the best example of McGuire’s albums on which he performed with an open-tuned guitar, an approach that provides a blissful sense of consonance and harmonic holism on sublime opener “Extended Forecast” and the lush album midpoint “Radio Flyer.” When he kicks on the distortion and lets the textural crackle overwhelm tracks like the stormy “The Marfa Lights” and the fuzz-blasted “Sick Chemistry,” he never sinks into pure noise or dissonance — an underlying melodicism still holds our attention as we hear him decide, piece by piece, on the next flourish to interject into his intensifying loop architectures.


While other albums from around this time found Mark McGuire in endless jam mode, A Pocket Full of Rain surprises us with the inclusion of five short pieces, with three clocking in at less than two minutes in length. These miniatures highlight the qualities of his performances that resonate with anyone who decides to dive into his catalog: warm melodic sentimentalism contrasted against alien abstraction; a driving momentum of forward motion that leads us over the next ridge only to find another taller peak waiting for us; a honed sense of textural sculpting and a stereo spread-filling depth of tone, all coming from one guitar and some effects pedals. His playing throughout A Pocket Full of Rain astounds with its casual virtuosity as torrents of delay-drenched arpeggios spiral around each other and latch into lattices that complicate with each additional layer of looped input.

While his performances beg comparisons to looping guitar forebears like Manuel Göttsching or Robert Fripp, McGuire points out that he had only discovered both of their music through friends’ recommendations as recently as a year or so before recording A Pocket Full of Rain — which makes the litany of releases that precede the album and establish his looped guitar style approach those precedents only by coincidence. McGuire explains that he was shocked when he first heard Göttsching’s Ash Ra Tempel album Inventions for Electric Guitar. Here was someone so clearly doing what he had been trying to do on the guitar, and in the mid-70s no less. But this happy concordance across eras circles around a timeless truth: it’s fun to make music on your own with whatever tools you have at your disposal. It feels good to take one guitar and turn it into a whole ensemble populated by many mirror images of yourself, all collaborating across the rotating duration of a long loop.

This performance style continues to enthrall us as listeners and as musicians ourselves simply because it has the potential, in the right hands, to sound beautiful in its density and complexity. Mark McGuire will tell you that he was feeling his way through it all, tempering his tactics with each album and trying to figure out a way to make music on his own terms, and that A Pocket Full of Rain is just one light along a trail that curves off into the horizon. But what a lovely light it is.




-Max Allison