press

“haunting musical experiments with the sounds that get stripped out of MP3’s…” – NPR

“It sounds beautiful, and ambient, and strange, and echoey, and ghostly” – Kenneth Goldsmith, on NPR

“(created) a great new genre of ambient ghost music” – Death and Taxes Magazine

“…stunning and ghostly music compositions…” – Public Radio Exchange

“finds musical inspiration in sounds that are lost” – CBC, Spark with Nora Young,

“It’s what the environment of our mind is missing: an endangered species of data.” – Neural Magazine, review of Ghost in the MP3

“sound that is lost from music when it’s digitized…retrieved these ghosts and (gave) them back some life!” – Broadcasting House, BBC Radio 4

“Ryan Maguire, a composer and sound artist, has made efforts to trace what he calls the “ghosts” of mp3 files to see what all is cut out when songs are converted to the digital format. The result is mindblowing…and could foreshadow future innovations in music production” – EDM.com

“elegiac and spooky”, “shapeshifting pixels” – Gawker

“The lingering remnants of digital compression… mere traces, incomplete and distorted…” – POST Matter

“(a) cool piece of experimental music” – The Daily Dot

“The musical clairvoyant who finds ghosts in your MP3’S” – NOISEY (Vice)

“an interesting look into what exactly is lost in compression” – The Kernel

“Oval wished they thought of this back in the 90s” – FACT Mag

“…melding and separating, ebbing and flowing, shaping and shifting, expanding like a whirling galaxy out through the room and inviting the audience to exist in the newly created sonic space” – C Ville

“Tuned gongs and bowls appear in quiet gestures as though waves of sound, and indeed, the piece feels oceanic and expansive. There are many great textures and colors– and many overall keen and serendipitous moments…” SEAMUS Review of “arpemonex”

““Heard, for solo piano” by Ryan Maguire is about the discrepancies between how people perceive sound and how computers hear via machine listening techniques. All of the musical material is derived from a field recording of a herd of cows (and their cowbells) during a summer thunderstorm. An eighteen minute performance, quite a few passages are played with the fingers placed directly on the strings of the piano, creating interesting and sometimes eerie effects. Very slow and spatial, it’s a fascinating piece!” – Mainly Piano, review of Wisconsin Soundscapes CD

“During the past few years, Maguire can be found just as readily performing alongside a set of instantaneous composers in Blood Moon — a troupe being revamped and expanded as Null Set — playing in what he refers to as a prog-inflected rock outfit, Sweet Tooth, or gigging what might be singer-songwriter fair, if it weren’t all run through a laptop setup.” – Pulse

“It sounds so cool.” – Jim James, from My Morning Jacket, on Ghost in the MP3