Alan Maguire began playing guitar at the age of fifteen; his early career consisted of playing with various upstart bands. At first the music they played was what everyone else seemed to be playing at the time, loud, lots of guitars, with majority male audiences. He recorded a few demos, played a few gigs, mostly to other people in bands. At one point towards the end of the 90’s he went to see Muff Winwood of Sony A&R in London. He told Alan his music would never be played on radio, and to come back if we ever wrote a song that could be a hit single. That seemed unlikely to happen. Alan set off in several directions at once. He found some like-minded musicians and together explored the world of free improvisation, which is the opposite of making a hit single. Secondly, he joined a band that played funk and soul music in night clubs, to audiences that now included both women and men. This was a lot more fun and lot less serious than the other music he had played, though it meant he had to completely change his approach to playing guitar. (More Nile Rogers, Less Dave Gilmour.) The third direction Alan took was to start recording music at home, by himself. He had been listening to Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, and he wanted try something different, so he started tinkering with synths and drum programming, without any clear idea of where he was going. Alan continued happily like this for years, playing semi regular gigs with various bands, until the end of 2014. At that point he started to look back at everything he had recorded and decided to archive it all online. There was hours of music, most of which he had little memory of making. It wasn’t all good, but a lot of it seemed interesting or at least unusual. Listening to it inspired him to focus on making new music that might somehow sum up the breadth of genres flirted with and the length of time he’d been playing. He set himself a challenge to record a new piece of music every week for a year and upload it to Soundcloud. He didn’t manage to maintain that schedule for more than a few months, but by the end of 2015 he realised the music had coalesced around a coherent sound, and he had unconsciously recorded his debut album: The City and the Sky.