Obituary: Mark Dwane 1954-2025

Guitar-Synthesist Mark Dwane Passes at 70 Years Old.

Mark Dwane July 30, 1954 – July 24, 2025

It’s a little rare that an artist can release nearly 40 albums across 37 years and still be extremely unknown, but that was the case with guitar-synthesist Mark Dwane. He released beautifully-constructed, harmonically-rich music full of sky-scraping melodies and cinematic moods. He was a favorite on Echoes and must have had enough success to keep on going, making music right up until the end with the release of Aeons, only weeks before he died on July 24, 2025 at the age of 70.

A lot of musicians play guitar synthesizer, but few have based their entire career around it. But that’s what it took for Mark Dwane to get the sounds he heard into the world. He’d been doing it since his 1988 debut, The Monuments of Mars, and nearly 40 more albums worth of electronic orchestrations, all played on his guitar synthesizer.

Mark Dwane was a musician who had progressive rock in his DNA. Born in 1954, he was just the right age to be seduced by 70s bands like Genesis, Yes and Van Der Graaf Generator. So when he started playing electric guitar and making music himself with a band called ORB, (not to be confused with The Orb), it naturally took off from there.

Listening to ORB, you could hear that Mark was a pretty hot guitarist, but despite absorbing the work of Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page, the Moog synthesizer ruined any potential he had for being a conventional guitar hero. He plugged his guitar into a VCS3 synthesizer and took off into worlds unknown. He eventually developed a system using MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface.) That made its recording debut on his first solo album in 1988. The Monuments of Mars modulated between new age atmospheres and his progressive rock roots. Mark had a wonderful sense of dynamics and a propulsive sense of melody. I scored several home videos with his music, especially, the title track to his second album, Angels, Aliens and Archetypes.

There were no keyboards used in Mark Dwane’s music: everything was triggered from his guitar-synth. Yet listening to his albums, you might never suspect there’s a guitar involved at all. Dwane created virtually all of his music from his guitar synthesizer set-up, but it usually means he’s not playing like a conventional guitarist. That’s what he had to do to extract an orchestra of sounds, known and unknown, and Mark always did it beautifully and lyrically. It wasn’t until his 2010 album, Other Worlds, that you could hear him play some pure electric guitar leads.

Mark grew up on science fiction and most of his albums used themes of fantasy, myth and sci-fi for title imagery. His first exposure to electronic music came through the 1956 movie, Forbidden Planet. The electronic soundtrack by Bebe and Louis Barron had a profound effect on him.

It often seemed like Mark hadn’t heard a UFO or alien conspiracy theory he didn’t believe. The Monuments of Mars was based on the Richard Hoagland book that makes a case for ancient life on the red planet. Mark propounds the concept of Atlantis on one album, and on another, the idea of alien ancestors. His album title, “The Nefilim.” is taken from a book called “Breaking the Godspell.” It posits the idea that man was descended from a gene splice with aliens. And then there’s 2012, named for the year when the Mayan calendar ended.  It was interpreted by many as the end of the world. But whether following theories of alien races or ancient civilizations, Mark Dwane made a heroic, often triumphal music.

He didn’t quite fit in with all the electronic genres of the 1990s and beyond. He didn’t play space music with sequencers on stun. He was too aggressive for new age and was too dramatic for ambient. And he certainly wasn’t making dance or club music. Those progressive rock influences never really left him, and informed a lot of his music. He was also a trained musician, and that set him way apart from a lot of electronic artists. Mark Dwane was pretty much his own thing.  While so many electronic musicians have headed off into the drone zone of sonic abstraction, Mark Dwane was an artist who still believed in the power of melody, the grandeur of a big crescendo and the stories held within a dramatic turn.

He had one CD of the Month on Echoes, but he would have had a lot more if he hadn’t gone fully digital early on. His music is always fun to play on the show. He favored very dramatic openings which made for a lot of great segues. But his music was also uplifting. You wanted to soar on his melodies and electronic grooves.

Mark is survived by his wife, Deborah, who also provided some wordless vocals to his music over the years.

I wrote this somewhere about Mark: “Cinematic music that paints the sky in electronic colors. Dwane is creating truly modern music, born of technology and draped around imagery of possible futures and past mythologies. After listening to Mark Dwane’s compositions, you feel like you’ve really been somewhere.”

Mark Dwane certainly took us somewhere. He never got the acclaim I thought he deserved. Mark’s final gift to us was the album, Aeons, his only real meditative release, composed while he was in the throes of chemotherapy, which sadly did not save him from the pancreatic cancer that ended his life days short of 71 years old.

I often use the expression, “left the planet” when someone dies. It’s a term I picked up from Sun Ra. It seems most appropriate for Mark Dwane. If he thought he was descended from aliens, I’m okay with that, since that may be why he made such incredible music. He is going to be missed.

See Mark Dwane’s Five Essential Albums from 2010