Детали релиза : MC Maguire - Meta-Conspiracy (2007) [FLAC (image + .cue)]

Bio

Michael C. Maguire's academic training started in 1971 at the University of British Columbia under composer/ethnomusicologist M. Y. Liang. After finishing his B.A., Maguire studied in Heidelberg with Uwe Lohrman (1976), then at Guildhall in London with Alfred Neiman (1977). In 1978 he returned to the University of British Columbia for a Masters Degree studyng with M. Y. Liang. He later worked on a PhD. at Eastman in Rochester, New York, studyng with Allen Schindler and Robert Morris (1980-85).

He has received numerous commissions including those from Canada Council, Pew Foundation, Opera America, Vancouver Foundatio, Banff Center, B. C. Cultural Fund and various performing artists, and has also received awards from Canada Council, CAPAC, PRO and the University Women's Club.

Michael has written for films, TV, advertising, opera and ballet, as well as pop music, electronica and numerous chamber and orchestral compositions. All works have been conceived, composed and mixed at his digital studio, Haro Street Music in Toronto.

His compositional approach combienes the folk languages of pop, jazz and world musics with the rigd structuralism and electronic distirtions of mind 20th to early 21st century European and North American composers. All of Maguire's works consist of a multi-track component (up to four hundred tracks) consisting of mathematically proportioned events, accompanied by virtuosic soloist/soloists (synchronized to CPU via click-track).


Tzadik

M C Maguire is a Canadian based composer who has created a personal and quirky hybrid blending classical and popular culture. The two works presented here are expansive concertos that pit a virtuoso soloist against a complex computer processed backgraound that is constantly in flux. Featuring David Swan on piano and John Gzowski on electric guitar the music is confrontational, extreme and packed with drama and excitement.

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Meta-Conspiracy

A Short History of Lounge

for Piano and CPU

Composed by MC Maguire
Piano - David Swan


A Short History of Lounge was originally a dance commission for the choreographer, Cornelius Fischer-Credo, written in 2001 and funded by the British Columbia Cultural Foundation. Cornelius asked for a jazz motif so I provided an obsessive running bass and occasional swing drums as the groove. Because of the extensive piano part in the original piece, I turned the work into a faux-concerto for piano and CPU in 2006. The title is a referance to A Brief History of the Universe; only here the ''hypothesis'' is in the everyday, mundane, mathematical, profusion of real time.

The structure is a quasi-rondo sonata, the main theme being a kind of Boulezian, pandiatonic Rumba which returns in various tempos and guises. A Beethovenesque repeated note motif begins all the movements as well as being the constant motivic pulse in all the metric modulations. The various long acc. and rit. end in the finale tempo of 900 = a quarter note.


Got That Crazy, Latin/Metal Feelin'

for Electric Guitar and CPU

Composed by MC Maguire
Electric Guitar - John Gzowski
Vocals - Christine Duncan, Sam Sinanan, MC Maguire


The origins of Got That Crazy, Latin/Metal Feelin' was a 2003 commission from Giorgio Magnanensi, the director of Vancouver New Music for small orchestra, electric guitar (Greg Lowe) and CPU. The piece was rewritten in 2006 for electric guitar and CPU.

The musical genesis came from a harmonic 49-chord progression (forward then back-wards through all major/minor keys). The progression is based on expanding major and minor thirds in the treble and bass, starting at E midi 3 and ending at Bflat midi 6 at the top and Bflat midi -1 at the bottom. The tempo structure was derived from the harmony as dictated by sampling transposition; in other words a fourth higher than 120 is 160 bpm, a fourth lower is 107 bpm, etc. The rhythmic structure came from metric modulations (3 to 4, 3 to 2, 4 to 3, 2 to 3), the foreground pulse/tempi going from slower/faster to slowest/fastest.

It was from this jazzy (somewhat Schenkerian), pendantic/obsessive progression that drifting latin memories of seven pseudo-60's Brazilian pop tunes would flow, subdividing the 49-chord progression. On top of this (Debussy-stolen) dream world is balanced the bipolar guitar part swaying unpredictably between rigid death metal and sentimental lounge noodling.


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Produced by MC Maguire
Executive Producer John Zorn
Associate Producer Kazunori Sugiyama

Live Soloist Recording by Brian Nevin at Metalworks, Toronto
Assistant Engineers Kevin Dietz, Laura Levesque, Helen Georgopoulos
Mastered by Scott Hull

Cover Image and Portraits Nicholas Vitis
Design Heung-Heung Chin

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Reviews


Arts Journal / postclassic

...Roll Over, Claude Vivier... His work for hire is rather amazingly sophisticated, and you can hear his imaginative commercials for Nike, Smirnoff, Fruit Loops (on his website), ... I first became aware of him via a torrential sound continuum called 'Seven Years 'on the 1989 Bang on a Can marathon, and and I've been trying to figure him out ever since. Because his music - wild, noisy, intense, relentlessly high-energy - is nearly opposite in style to most of the music I like, but it is nothing at all like most modernist music characterized by those qualities, and I always have to admire fanaticism.

Most of his pieces are what he calls "concertos," by which he means pieces for solo instrument accompanied/obliterated by tape or electronic soundfile layered with from 200 to 400 tracks. The noise periodically parts for pop references and quotations: lightly-altered pop songs, the scherzo from Bruckner's Eighth, Brazilian pop, heavy metal, all cascading by like someone trying to find his favorite radio station during a hurricane. .he had to alter some of the quotations to avoid copyright infringement. He claims that he replaced the vocal parts with vocalists singing software manuals in Portugese, but Mike's humor is so dry that it's hard to discern where reality ends and satire begins - probably somewhere within his music.

It turns out, though, that beneath all the wildness runs a detailed sense of proportion and structure as obsessive as that of the Berg Chamber Concerto or the middle studies of Nancarrow. Got That Crazy Latin/Metal Feelin' is based on 49 tonalities that alternately rise and descend by thirds.., the piece ascends to chord 7, returns to 1, slogs its way up to 14, returns to 1, and so on until it finally climbs the mountain of 49. The central tonality is the E power chord of the guitar solo, and you can sometimes hear the music dramatically return to it via a circle of fourths - though Maguire's moments of repose and respite start about where Mahler's climaxes end. Short History of Lounge, its title notwithstanding, is - at least on paper - a conventional three-movement concerto form, though enlivened by background quotations and sections that greatly accelerate and decelerate. The finale runs through an incredible gradual deceleration from quarter note = 900 to quarter note = 4. The magnitude of such gestures leaves you exhausted.

In retrospect, though, I should have figured that his sense of form was knitted together by obsessively detailed structure, because it would be extremely difficult to make music of such rich complexity without a plan to generate all the various moments: the musical analogue of Bruno's Theater of memory. .I can see why Zorn likes the music - perhaps a rare point at which our tastes overlap. Maguire's not completely isolated in Canadian music, for his friend Paul Dolden also makes take pieces of mammothly superimposed hundreds of tracks, and has gained a little more attention for doing so. But with his peculiar blend of postmodern style juxtapositions, pop appropriations, and fanatical intellectual structure, I think Maguire's the most original Canadian composer since R. Murray Schafer - and I don't know Schafer's music well enough to be certain the qualifier is necessary.


All Music Guide

Lively, Aggressive, Passionate, Ambitious, Searching, Dramatic, Theatrical, Eccentric, Uncompromising, Elaborate, Literate MC Maguire has been commissioned by dance companies to compose music, and in the case of Meta-Conspiracy, it could have easily been done for experimental films. What he creates on this daring recording can easily be pegged 21st century contemporary electronic music, but it is so much more than that. Moreover, Maguire's concept is to toss all elements in a blender set on high speed, and listen to the different styles and genres playfully bounce off each other knowing they will not necessarily mix or match and turn into brown goop.

The music, which at times incorporates up to 400 separate tracks from a CPU through layering, sonic sampling and the usage of live improvising instrumentalists, is a fascinating study on how to make new music through digital techniques, written scores and the wide world of sound. Two nearly half-hour compositions are included, and the dizzying heights the music achieves is astounding by any criteria. "A Short History Of Lounge" -- not all that short -- explores a legitimate jazz stance glued to a faux-concerto/quasi-rondo, taking normal circumstance and day-to-day living, stacking it on high in mass plus-plus-plus algebraic run-on sentences, and using pianist David Swan as the control factor. A spoken word warning and industrial sounds inform the pianist's role as an informant, not a prevaricator.

The music is dense and requires close listening as you hear this epic of variations and ethnomusicology in super high definition, drama and duress. A blues harmonica, symphonic notions, a vocal chorus, and a calmed piano repast enter the fray briefly. It's like Frederic Rzewski meets Steve Reich meets The Residents on acid playing laptops. The concept is loosely based on "A Brief History Of The Universe." The second piece "Got That Crazy Latin/Metal Feeling" is based on a 49 chord harmonic progression that moves backward, then forward, although it is not that readily discernable. Mathematics, Brazilian pop, perhaps Captain Beefheart's jazzier side, Claude Debussy, and the influence of Euro-electro pioneer Michael Schenker of The Scorpions and UFO are acknowledged. The dynamic range goes up and down with death rock and metal sounds of electric guitarist John Gzowski as the focal point. The music, as peculiar as it might seem, is never crowded or constipated. At times symphonic, manic and accented by a trio of vocalists including Maguire, whether noodling, rigid or plain ridiculous, the music has a certain warm substance within its obvious schizophrenia. The medication has been taken, it is absorbed and efficient, yet there's an underlying turbulence that cannot be denied. This is a wonderful project, hopefully spawning other similar efforts, and marks Maguire as a unique figure in any genre of contemporary modern music you choose.

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Top Ten 2007


December 2007 - syro0.twoday.net / Germany

01. Lil Wayne
02. Lucinda Williams
03. Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson sings Peter Lieberson: Neruda Songs
04. Rene Jacobs: Don Giovanni
05. M.C. Maguire: Meta-Conspiracy two totally crazy compositions with dozens of tracks for CPU accompanied by live instruments piano and electric guitar
06. BjOrk: Volta
07. Patti Smith: Twelve
08. Feist: The Reminder
09. Natasha Bedingfield: N. B.
10. Radiohead: In Rainbows


December 2007 - cowboysfringants.com / France

01. To Live and Shave in L.A.: Les Tricoteuses
02. Nondor Nevai «DMT Rok» execute par _ ("Undrskor")
03. The Flying Luttenbachers: Incarcerated by Abstraction
04. Nondor Nevai: Wooden Machine Music/2001
05. Foetus: Vein
06. Haswell/Hecker: Blackest Ever Black
07. Ergo Phizmiz: Nose points in different directions
08. RLW avec rm74: Pirouetten
09. M.C. Maguire: Meta-Conspiracy
10. To Live and Shave in L.A. 2: The 300 Dollar Silk Shirt