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	After graduating from Berklee School of Music for guitar, Ben McClintock returned home to invent a new sound for his music. McClintock, who has quickly formed a group temporarily named Wal-Mart, will play at Burt’s Tiki Lounge on Friday.

After graduating from Berklee School of Music for guitar, Ben McClintock returned home to invent a new sound for his music. McClintock, who has quickly formed a group temporarily named Wal-Mart, will play at Burt’s Tiki Lounge on Friday.

Artist's Avenue

Ben McClintock has returned to his native Albuquerque, but only for a bit. He graduated from Berklee College of Music for guitar, but figured too many other people did the same thing. Now he’s come home to invent a unique sound and perfect it before he moves to San Francisco. Since his return, McClintock has joined up with some friends to form a group temporarily named Wal-Mart. McClintock is also teaching guitar lessons.

Daily Lobo: Who are you?

Ben McClintock: My full name is Ben McClintock. I am originally from Albuquerque, but I’ve spent the last four years in Boston studying music at Berklee College of Music.

I play guitar but I’m very interested in new sounds and electronic sounds. I’ve invested a lot of time and money into effects pedals, guitar-effects pedals and whatnot. I played in a band out in Boston for a couple years, and we did a New England tour, and then we disbanded shortly before I moved back to Albuquerque, which was just a couple days ago. Now I’m just going to write a lot of music and try to teach, and then towards the end of this year I’m going to move to San Francisco to tap into the music scene out there.

DL: What brought you back to Albuquerque?

BM: I needed some time to catch up with what I’ve learned. I want to digest what I’ve learned, and Albuquerque is a much easier place to do that for me. There’s not as much distraction here as there was in Boston.

DL: When did you get into guitar and music?

BM: I started playing music real late, around the time I first went to college. And at that point I just got really into it. Then, after that first year of college, I took a year-and-a-half off just to practice, and then I got into Berklee in January of 2006.

DL: Are you going to be playing shows while you’re back in Albuquerque digesting your education?

BM: There’s a local band here called A Man About a Horse, and we kind of formed a little side project (Wal-Mart), and we’re playing a show this Friday at Burt’s Tiki Lounge. The two other members in the band are both playing different instruments. I’m going to be playing guitar, and I’ve got all my effect toys to mess around with. It’s going to be kind of improvised. We’re trying to form basic structures and we’re going to try and play around that.

DL: How did you break away from doing traditional guitar to experimental effect music?
BM: Berklee College of Music — there’s a thousand guitarists there studying guitar.

So it just became very apparent to me that it’s very easy to fall into this guitarist style. And there are so many people that do the same thing, and I feel kind of like it’s just regurgitated and it’s not very creative. It kind of turns into a competition of who can play the traditional stuff the best, and I don’t really have an interest in competitive music. And then my band in Boston, we were called Izzi Creo, we were an instrumental three-piece of guitar, bass and drums. So we had to figure out a lot of ways to keep the audience interested, because you don’t have vocals and you don’t have a lot of information for dynamics.

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DL: What kind of things do you do to keep your audience interested?

BM: All of our songs are pretty long: I think the shortest song we had was seven minutes. It’s a lot of pre-composed music where we would start with an idea, and it was rare that we would repeat an idea. And that was one thing that we consciously did so we could keep things moving and have movement with other songs. My other two bandmates were Berklee students, so we tried to utilize a lot of what we learned without being too obvious about it. I think a lot of bands that we played with, or bands that come out of Berklee, are very technical-based and sometimes it just doesn’t even sound good.


“Wal-Mart”
Friday, 7 p.m.
Burt’s Tiki Lounge
313 Gold Ave. SW
Free

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