Trash of Civilizations

This is an interesting album that doesn't sound like all the rest. The press release that accompanied this CD described the music as "ethno/prog-alt rock/jazz electronica"...and that is probably the best descriptive word string for this music. The disc is divided into two segments. "The Spawn of Abe," the first track, is over 28 minutes long and features only three players: Max Christie on clarinet, Mark Rogers on oboe, and MC Maguire on CPU. "Narcissus auf Bali," the second track, is even longer...clocking in at almost 40 minutes...and features the playing skills of Trevor Tureski (vibraphone),Ryan Scott (marimba), and (again) Maguire on CPU. Both of these pieces feature plenty of spontaneous improvisation...sorta like a cross between modern classical and modern jazz. All kinds of trippy sounds and voices bleed in and out of the mix...making for some rather strange and unpredictable listening. The second track is a truly wild ride indeed. Definitely an audio collage kind of experience here. Not recommended for folks needing and/or wanting simple hits to dance to. Mighty strange stuff...esoteric and strangely...hypnotic. We love it. Highly recommended. (Rating: 5+++)- dONW7, Babysue Top Picks

MC Maguire's insane and irritating work for Lee Su-Feh's Gecko Eats Fly (which won the French award for choreography in 1998) has resurfaced as Maguire's "Narcissus Auf Bali" on Innova Records. It still makes Su-Feh crazy, but I love it. Check it out. He's a Genius.

- Battery Opera

Electroacoustic genre-clashing romps through a universe of sound blending live and organized sources from composer Maguire, works that have to be heard to be believed.

- Squidco

"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" That's the reaction Chicken Little would have upon hearing this disc. Others might exclaim, "Yikes!" or "Holy shit!" or "Oh no, the apocalypse!" And, in fact, this disc does sound like the end of the world: dense, loud, and unrelenting. These compositions pile sound upon sound, whether it be a spoken sample, folk riff, guitar feedback, explosion, or orchestral bombast, until the sources sardine each other like rush hour commuters. Some refer to this ambitious art as sound collage, but this phrase implies a minimum of overlapping edges. Instead, MC Maguire's Trash of Civilizations is more like a jumble, a repainted canvas with peeling layers, a wreck of girders and plastique. Listening is more than cinematic; it's sensory overload, an embarrassment of sonic riches shoehorned into a mere hour of music. Windows shatter, pool balls are broken, Godzilla roars: it's all here. This is probably not a good album to listen to on LSD, but it offers the same hallucinatory disorientation.

Why would you want this? Why would you want bombs and machine gun fire and minarets and choruses of crying babies? Why would you want crashing drums and chanting worshippers and improvised violin and vocoders? Some, admittedly, might not. The two tracks here are intensely musical, but follow no set pattern, offer no discernible beginning or end, pause not a second for reflection. As soon as one catches a snatch of melody adrift in the miasma and starts bobbing the head in empathetic recognition, the moment is over, interrupted, jarringly fused to the next. Whenever the pulse begins to pound in recognition of a pattern or overall scheme, the samples shift, or topple into live playing, and the blueprint is lost. The effect is like that of garbage pail punch (a popular fraternity drink in which every alcohol imaginable is poured into a trash can and masked with Kool-Aid) ..you don't know what's in it, but it packs a wallop.

So what exactly is going on here? The first track, "Spawn of Abe," pre-enacts a religious culture clash in which the world's top three monotheistic faiths, each of which traces its roots back to Abraham, go at it with each other. We get calls to Islamic prayer, Jewish folk tunes, and snippets of Christian hymn, overlaid by orchestral clashes, angry guitar feedback, military drills, and an overall sense of cacophony. The half-hour track begins and ends at full throttle, with no letup in between; it's a loud sandwich, with loud toppings, and it's breathtaking. There's no way to discern the intent of the composer, but one can easily speculate. Perhaps "Spawn of Abe" is meant to be satiric, mocking claims of exclusivity, or perhaps it is simply the musical equivalent of a little boy gleefully smashing all of his trucks together.

"Narcissus auf Bali" is a Balinese retelling of the story of Narcissus and Echo. The vibraphone takes center stage, while orchestral noises meander behind. Because this track features a primary instrument, the track seems at first to be more formulaic, but after ten minutes, a spoken sample changes the proceedings. We plummet into a world of birds and bongos, bazaar samples, ethnic singing and then, without warning, crunches, crashes, and cavings-in. When the vibraphone returns, its once-soothing sound turns suspect; we've been lulled before, but next time will not be as easily fooled. And so, we try not to be taken aback when we hear laser rays. At this point, why not?. The story of a god drowning because he is enamored with his own reflection carries much less weight than that of an apocalyptic vision, until the very end, laden with circus sounds, and fire, and screaming, and death.

One cannot help but admire the chutzpa required to carry such a project to fruition. At each juncture, given the choice, MC Maguire obviously went for faster, louder, more...

- Silent Ballet

Genre jumping world shattering mind-bending sonic orgy. Jesus Christ, what a mess. I haven't heard this many styles thrown together in one song since Secret Chiefs 3: middle eastern, African tribal, 80s hair metal, daft punk, insanely epic Hollywood soundtracks...and that's just the first 6 minutes. Technically these are two modern classical pieces for clarinet/oboe (track 1) and vibraphone/marimba (track 2), but MC Maguire steals the show on the CPU, sampling and synthesizing his heart away and dropping a gazillion bombs on you fools. You don't have to play the tracks in their entirety ( you might lose a few years of life if you do) but you are required by law to play at least bits and pieces. Indescribably awesome stuff. 1. (28:11) Completely off the wall psycho epic soundtrack modern orchestra. If you're not sold by the first few bars, skip forward to about 2:10 to where the drums start galloping in and heaven comes down to rock out on earth. Time signatures change abruptly and without warning, and the sound palette reaches everywhere. Probably a thousand individual climaxes are hit in a half hour. 

2. (39:53) Softer than the previous. A sort of underwater marimba dream where little marimba man is playing his little marimba...until he hits the wrong key and the entire universe explodes into a dynamic rumbling bliss fest where Navajo Indians battle Zeus and Achilles for global supremacy. And you haven't heard epic until you've made it pat the 30 minute mark... Absolutely nuts.

- Barbra Anne, Zookeeper

With the hyperkinetic MC Maguire, we hear a work from 2007,"Narcissus auf Bali" for vibraphone, marimba and computer. "Narcissus auf Bali" is a kind of twist on the Greek myth of "Adriadne auf Naxos," but in MC Maguire has transformed the story of Narcissus who feverishly looking for the beautiful Echo in the Balinese jungle.

- Kaleidoscope

MC Maguire's moniker sounds like that of a rapper, and there is indeed a sampler's mind-set at work in the Canadian postmodernist's brainy mishmashes. The composer's mission statement, per his website, is to save art from extinction via "reevaluation of high-art aesthetics in the light of popular culture's ubiquitous, formulaic infectiousness." The tone of the opening track on MC Maguire's latest, Trash of Civilizations, mirrors Girl Talk's ADHD cutting-and-pasting but replaces the whimsy with kaffiyeh-wearing grad-student pretension and moody video-game scores. The premise of "Spawn of Abe" unquestionably compels: A klezmer clarinet and a mizmar-like oboe traverse a soundscape of dusty Cairo streets, crowded Tel Aviv bars and chaotic battle scenes (all field recordings here). But early-'90s synth work renders several segments near-comic. Maguire is not to be dismissed, however. If "Abe" plays like a shroom-induced nightmare trek through the streets of Bethlehem, the album's second and final track, "Narcissus auf Bali," retains the composer's maximalist approach while remaining far more structurally coherent. Japanese pop lines feud with Balinese monkey vocalizations in this epic battle, which eloquently integrates solo vibraphone and marimba into a turbulent mix of East and West. It's not clear if, like the gaudy cover art, these half-hour pieces are intentionally ironic or just ambitious attempts by an overeager designer...- Doyle Armbrust, Time Out Chicago

There’s interesting stuff going on north of the border, especially when it comes to music which “mashes up” previous music to make new work. John Oswald got into serious trouble with his “Plunderphonics” some years back because he had the chutzpah to use Michael Jackson samples (and images), which aroused corporate fear and ire (and unleashed the lawyers). MC Maguire is probably smarter, in that he uses a huge range of samples blended in such a way as to create a fluctuating wall of sound where nothing is specifically identifiable. This is a report from the front of cutting-edge experiment. These two works (dating from 2008 and 1997, respectively) are each immense, rather like weather systems passing through, dumping rain and snow, with patches of sunlight, before they’ve run their course. They appear to have gone through different mutations before reaching this incarnation, where live instruments have been added to each to provide a sort of acoustic/real-time commentary. ( Nota bene : “cpu” is central processing unit, aka a computer, for those who may be scratching their heads.)This music will certainly not be for everyone. It revels in a sort of “info-overload” that, while representative of our era, goes against our usual ideals of concentrated, active listening. I think that for the 30- and 40-minute durations of each, one can go deep into the moment, but one will also have to withdraw in order to maintain a certain sanity. And that fluctuation in listening I think is natural to this music. …. Maguire seems to be rather listening to the world around him and just transcribing its multiplicity, even chaos. (Reading his notes, one discovers there’s a lot of architectural planning involved in what at first seems a completely capricious flow of sounds.)For some, this won’t be classical music, maybe not even music. (Based on the cover alone, they might avoid the disc, as it looks like a release from some sort of death-metal band.) In the end, for me that’s not a useful question.. In fact, I may not even like this music, but that also seems not very relevant to the experience. Rather, this feels like something very engaged with our time that teaches us something about ourselves and our culture. It’s fascinating, though perhaps a little like the way a car wreck beckons us to rubberneck. So I do recommend it, as an original, even disturbing, but creatively challenging experience for any listener.

- Robert Carl, Fanfare

...with his near-epileptic maximalism, ...... using up almost up to 300 different layers of interaction and contrasts. There remains a clarity in building up the layers, even from completely different worlds, and in different rhythms, it is still controlled by the mind of the composer, the composition with classical underground directs, while all the elements tend to be behind or different, the compositional effect remains just that little bit stronger. Where the melodic compositional effects of computer composing could be tiring and limited is this edge of chaos which at the same time seems to overcome the compositional restrictions of melodic computer models, which makes the piece interesting. The second piece of nearly 40 minutes, “Narcissus auf Bali” is almost too much to handle. Again, the totality of interaction is near-chaotic and the maximalism often is too saturating up to a claustrophobic nervousness of an effect, with an overload of impulses that are but partly cooperative, so therefore this becomes narcotically epileptic. Too much is too much. Too much fragmentation is happening within a context that has no time to adapt but to collect, this is on the edge of a damaging collapse of the senses.- Gerald Van Waes, Psyche Music

“The Spawn of Abe,” the first of two tracks, is a 28-minute double concerto for clarinet (Max Christie on B-flat clarinet) and oboe (Mark Rogers), backed by a brilliant collage that evokes the sonic clashes of Charles Ives, updated to the contemporary Middle East. It’s a helter-skelter mix that explores, as Maguire writes in liner notes, the three major monotheistic religions with “incantations of mullahs, rabbis and priests, with the singing of cantors, muezzins and Gregorian Chant, Al-Quaeda ditties, a Bin Laden cameo, American-Jewish comedians, klezmer bands, Arab pop music, bars in Tel Aviv, the streets of Cairo, air raid sirens, jets, helicopters …

Inevitably, “The Spawn of Abe” spirals down the funnel of history toward another Holocaust, or maybe an ecumenical apocalypse. Few sounds are as instantly chilling as droning, WWII-era sirens. But after brief consideration, the music instead catapults into cosmic outer space — a little cheesy, perhaps, but satisfying in the context.

The other track, coming in at 40 minutes, is “Narcissus auf Bali,” on the Narcissus and Echo myth. It’s another double concerto of sorts, this time for vibraphone (Trevor Tureski) and marimba (Ryan Scott) backed by an “orchestra” of computer-processed sounds based on gamelan from the Indonesian island of Bali. It’s fun, manic, funny. The climax edges toward generic Hollywood, at which point this clever piece goes Roman Empire Epic on us...

...much of this album, the music is enthralling. The music brims with ideas and abundant pleasures. Pop and “world” music are as powerful an influence as 20th-century classical. Indeed, the creator might not deign to call the stuff “classical” at all.

- Pierre Ruhe, Arts Critic Atl