ELORA – An unassuming blue coach house on a property in Elora is actually a home music studio where a local composer has crafted most of his latest album he's been working on for the past 10 years.
Andy McNeill, originally from Toronto but living in Elora for nearly 20 years, will be releasing electronic music album Ecstatic on May 17 under the artist name Maple Mountain Sunburst.
“It used to have a longer name and more pretentious name,” McNeill joked in an interview at the coach house studio behind his home in Elora.
He was referring to a 2010 album he released under the artist name Maple Mountain Sunburst Triolian Orchestra. McNeill was going for a Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band type of feel but most people couldn’t remember it all anyways so it was shortened.
Maple Mountain is a place in northern Ontario where McNeill has taken canoe trips and he considers it to be a very beautiful place. Sunburst is in reference to a prized triolian steel guitar he has from the 1930s with a walnut sunburst finish.
It’s just one of many guitars hanging or on display in his home studio among other instruments such as keyboards or a rare mellotron, a keyboard-like instrument similar to a sampler that uses tapes to make sounds.
“The funny thing is, I’m not a great guitar player and I’m not a great player of any particular instrument,” McNeill said. “I’m a writer, a composer more than anything. I work with sounds.”
It all started in the early 1980s when McNeill and a friend rented a drum machine and synth from Long & McQuade as they were really into music like Devo and Kraftwerk at the time.
He ended up going to what was then called Ryerson University to study radio and television arts but continued playing around with synthesizers and keyboards.
“I had high school music but I didn’t really study music after that, I’m kind of self taught that way,” McNeill said.
It can be a bit difficult to label Maple Mountain Sunburst with an official genre, the artist himself had trouble pinpointing it down.
He described it as electronic, instrumental, retro, trippy, atmospheric and cinematic.
“The other word that comes up that I think makes it different and distinct from other electronic (music), because there’s so much electronic stuff, is that there’s a blissful positivity vibe to it,” McNeill said.
He didn’t go into making this album with any particular plan. He has been creating bits of music, sometimes in the middle of the night, in between his regular work over the last 10 years when he decided he had enough to put together another album.
“It’s the total opposite of The Beatles recording an album in a day or two,” McNeill said.
To pay the bills, McNeill does scores for television and documentaries such as The Fifth Estate, The Nature of Things and Jonovision. He made a switch to doing music for children’s shows, recently finishing work on Agent Binky: Pets of the Universe which he’s enjoyed despite it being a little bit different than what he normally does.
“I got into doing rock and roll for five year olds, it's an amazing switch in my work path,” McNeill said.
McNeill said he’s looking forward to people getting to hear the album and recommends listening with headphones because it's mixed in Dolby Atmos making a more immersive listening experience.
