Douglas Stuff

  The Schoolyard and the Soundscapes The Local Rebel vs. The Global Icon Long before Mark O’Leary shared stages with international icons, the global stadium rock of Pink Floyd was merely the local background noise of his Cork childhood. The Wall provided an unexpected gateway. Specifically, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” served as his introduction to the sophisticated Dorian mode and David Gilmour’s masterfully fluid solo work—a solo O’Leary still cites as among Gilmour's finest. In a bizarre, cross-generational contrast of scales, Bob Ezrin (the powerhouse producer of that very album) would later work briefly on Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy with John O’Mahoney—a former student of O’Leary’s from the Wright Music Centre in Cork. Rigid Classrooms vs. Expansive Metamorphosis There is a moment in every musician’s life where the linear world transmogrifies into something altogether more expansive. For O’Leary, that metamorphosis happened early, echoing through the r...

The interactive nodes of the corpus of music history tend to be diametric in their manifestation. More often, it traverses and transcends decades, continents, and generations through a series of unlikely conductors. For contemporary guitarist/electronic musician/composer Mark O’Leary, tracking that inductive reasoning leads directly back to Düsseldorf in the early 1970s—and a band called Neu!. In a compelling retrospective, O’Leary maps out the trajectory of a group that defied the conventions of their era, laying down a rhythmic and sonic blueprint that would alter the course of modern alternative music ( 1:26 ) . The Architecture of the Motorik Beat As O’Leary recounts, the story begins in the mid-1970s when the electronic pioneers Kraftwerk found themselves in need of a drummer ( 0:00 ) . Enter Klaus Dinger, an exceptional musician who would become a primary purveyor of the Motorik style ( 0:00 ) . O’Leary has cited Klaus Dinger as one of his main inspirations within the Rock Dr...