Lucky Ian got to see Emeralds and Arp the other night, and he made sure to call and brag afterwards about all the cool merch he bought. Kind man that he is, he offered to share his copy of the limited-edition tour CDr that was being sold by Mark McGuire, about whom you might have read (good things!) yesterday. Mr. McGuire is the axe-slinging member of Emeralds, but he’s also an electronic knob twiddler, vocalist and tape manipulator. His middle name is Daniel. Go figure!
Things Fall Apart takes is name, of course, from that staple of high school English class of same name, written by Chinua Achebe. Set in a fictional village in Nigeria, the story revolves around a group leader and his family as they come in contact with colonialists and missionaries. A lot of the text deals with internal and communal wars between traditions and change. McGuire must have been deeply moved by this book, as its themes are prevalent in this recording.
I’m totally kidding, of course, I have no fucking clue whether or not Things Fall Apart has anything to do with Chinua Achebe. For all I know it was the first thing that popped into McGuire’s head when he was thinking, “Shit, I’ve recorded this beautiful piece of looped guitar amazingness and now I have to think of a stupid name for it!” And then he thought really hard, probably squeezing shut his eyes as if to remedy some imaginary aneurysm, or a brain fart. In a moment of sublime reflection, McGuire most likely recalled not Chinua Achebe, but that “artsy” ex-girlfriend of his who was way too gung-ho about poetry for him to handle. “Why couldn’t she ever hang out without taking pictures of everything?” He might have asked himself. As if by supernatural force, McGuire found himself mouthing the words to “The Second Coming.”
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
He un-clinched his eyelids and straightened up. “Yeah, man. Fucking Yeats. That guy was totally on. He knew his shit. He somehow perfectly described this guitar piece almost a hundred years before I recorded it!”
At that point, I imagine, all that was left to do was record a second track to balance out the album. Because you can’t charge people money for one 20-minute piece of music. That would make you an asshole. So, McGuire recorded another song. This one was called “Inside Where It’s Warm,” which is about some hot piece of pussy he dug out while he was in his teens. Probably.
And there you have it: a totally made up, not-in-any-way-true story relating how this awesome two-track CDr was conceived. Stay tuned for the next installment of Treasures From The Collectors Slum, where I’ll somehow relate an obscure outsider record from the ’70s to an ancient Hittie myth from the 18th century BC. Yes, I will cite Wurrukatte, the Hittie God of War.
Mark McGuire
Things Fall Apart
MediaFire DL Link
01. Things Fall Apart
02. Inside Where It’s Warm
…My sincerest apologies to Mark McGuire.
