John McGuire was born and raised in Southern California, and spent his childhood orbiting the film industry. His family was involved in various areas of entertainment, and by the time he was a sophomore in college, McGuire was balancing his studies with tour schedules—he was the lighting designer for live shows by Mariah Carey and My Chemical Romance.
By the time he started TrasK House in 2016, McGuire had decades of experience and a distaste for conventional live shows. "You don't get to experience artist's the way you used to," he said, "and all of a sudden, the live concert has become the epitome of an artist's representation." With TrasK, McGuire began to experiment, most notably in his work on Kanye West's Saint Pablo tour. The floating stage was a sensation, and McGuire followed it up with Travis Scott's iconic Bird's Eye View tour, which featured the artist atop a massive mechanical bird, complete with a worm dangling from its mouth.
"When you go back and look at any of our performances, there's always very primitive, primal, basic things that rein through all of them," he continued. "When we built Saint Pablo... there was an energy to life at that time. We had the Par Can... a single incandescent light bulb. One light, goes on and off, and that's it. We took that, and went with modern engineering... and new weight ratings to make a whole new experience. A lot of times it's using the oldest technology we have with some spit of the new."
Watch our latest Music Life with John McGuire above, and find out if New Yorkers miss the old Kanye below.
