Magpu made music from 1998 to 2003, primarily around the Dallas - Fort Worth area. We still like the music we made, and hope you enjoy it too.
News
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You asked for it, you got it – all the Magpu setlists in one place!
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On this day in 2001: Magpu at the Redblood Club with BAGG!
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On this day in 1999: Magpu at the Aardvark!
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On this day in 1999: Magpu at Trees!
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We’re back! After a few weeks of server outage, magpu.com is back in action, with a revamped look and a better way to play audio. We’re using modern tooling that makes for easier updates. Thanks for visiting – check out some tunes while you’re here!
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Give yourself burrito transplant surgery!
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Some more flyers and newspaper scraps:
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Happy 12th anniversary, Magpu!
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More flyers, artwork, and postcards from Club Dada! (The latter are not exactly flyers nor artwork, but we have them anyway.) Visit the following shows to see what’s new:
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The 2003-03-01 jam session is now available for convenient listening through your web browser. Check it out!
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A cornucopia of flyers and fantastic artwork! Check out the following shows for freshly-uploaded images:
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Nine years ago today, we played a special show at Club Dada. Check it out: 2000-06-22
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7-11! Just uploaded are two shows from seven and eleven years ago today: 1998-05-08 and 2002-05-08 Check out the first Freighd and the last Ride the Tide!
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Seven years ago today, Magpu played the Gypsy Tea Room. We were quite pleased with how the show turned out, and put together a mix of the audience and soundboard recordings. It’s now available for your listening enjoyment! You can find the show here:
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New upload! May 28, 1998 was a monumental show from the early days. Listen and/or download here:
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For the eleventh anniversary of the first Magpu show, we have a revamped web site that makes it easier for you to listen to our music and easier for us to maintain. Check out the first Magpu show by clicking on the “play” icon:
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New Music for 2005!
Magpu’s Kurt Kistler and Cliff McCarthy have formed Escher’s Elevator, an abstract improvisational collaboration that takes the spirit of Magpu into the land of keyboards and effects. Come see us in Denton, Texas, on Tuesday, February 8, 2005
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New download available! Cliff’s first Magpu show (Home Bar, 1998-05-28) is now avalable for download
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New download available! Magpu’s 100th show at the Boar’s Nest is now available for download.
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Six years ago today, Magpu first performed in public, at Tom Prejean’s open mic night at Club Dada. Happy Pu Year! (The show is now available for download.)
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Terry McIntyre’s composition “Yardwork” is the first song written in the year 2000… We have proof!
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Check out the audio from the mostly-Magpu jam session at Brian’s house on 1 March 2003!
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Magpu means adaptation. On 22 May 2003, circumstances left us without a bass player for the evening. In our continuing tradition of embracing the unexpected and adapting to it, we spontaneously reconfigured as our percussionists took on bass duties. It was a memorable experience for us, and we appreciate all of you who were there to experience it with us. Watch this site for more news on how you can accompany Magpu on future journeys into the unknown.
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Thanks to everyone who came out to the Boar’s Nest on Friday and made our 100th show a really fun night! The audience creates the music; thanks for making music with us!
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Magpu is almost 4 years old! That is if you start at the first show at Club Dada in Dallas, TX on April 12, 1998. At the age of 4, a band is ready to start pre-school. To commemorate, we are having a mini-tour of Texas centered on the 4-year anniversary of our first show. Unlike pre-school, there will be no nap time, but finger painting is encouraged. We will also have available some complementary copies of Recreational Music, the long-in-the-making studio album of some of our written songs. See Upcoming Shows for show time and venue details.
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“Last night…..”
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There is a rift developing in Magpu. All things reconsidered, it isn’t nearly fast enough for you, my friend, my friend.
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Just got back from our gig at the Redblood Club with the Greyhounds What a cool night! This was a very lucky Friday the 13th. I made plenty of flubs during our set, thanks in part to distractions from a malfunctioning note on my MalletKAT, but overall our set seemed to go pretty well. The fun really began when the Greyhounds took the stage. You can’t help but dance to their music. Everybody got a good groove going during their first set. Things really took off in their second set when Kurt began layering sounds from his Prophecy keyboard over the Greyhounds’ jamming. He then launched them into the next song with an ultra-phat synth bass line. Terry contributed slide whistle and assorted percussion, and soon Brian and I got up and started jamming too. Across the stage, I could see things getting really crazy in the keyboard department – Terry took over on Prophecy and everyone started reaching around for different keyboards. Audience members joined in on shakers and doumbek, and I even contributed a hose solo. Brian played a guitar solo so cool that I wanted to yell out, “I’m in his band! I’m in his band!” After this musical journey to places none of us could have predicted, Magpu yielded the stage to the Greyhounds who picked up the pieces with one more solid groove. They’re not your average white band. Thanks to everyone in the audience who got down with us! We’re as eager as the rest of you to see the Greyhounds return to Dallas! (–cliff)
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Stillwater, Oklahoma
A grim night. We drove in just as it was starting to sleet. The weather threatened a nasty ice storm all night long, though it never materialized. Stillwater is where Oklahoma State University is located, and one of the basketball team’s plane crashed on the way back from Colorado that night, killing several people. Nevertheless, we played three relatively brief sets, including a blues jam with a local character named “Watermelon Slim” on harmonica and vocals. We played some blues at our Muddy Waters show in November, as well. Could this be a new direction for Magpu? Prog-blues? Stay tuned…
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Tahlequah, Oklahoma
This show was the surprise of the Arklahoma Winter Tour. It was the best attended and most enthusiastically received show of the three, despite being booked as a low key “filler” show between the other two shows, which were anticipated as the “high profile” ones. It was sloppier than the Fayetteville show, but the Tahlequahians (?) couldn’t care less. They were dancing in 7/8, 19/16 and other illegal time signatures. Tahlequah was a “Late Show With David Letterman” home office location for a while, according to a very large sign on the side of a building there. Viva la Quah! We hope to return soon.
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Fayetteville, Arkansas
The show at Chester’s was solid musically, but sparsely attended. We were told that a touring Grateful Dead cover band was in town as well, which probably didn’t help. Chester’s is apparently named after a cat, since the walls are covered with cat-related art. We can appreciate this kind of feline inspiration, with half of our lyric songs involving Moop (Terry’s cat) in some way. The only missing element is Mexican food. Chester’s will be the ultimate Magpu venue once they serve Rather Large portions Mexican food. [Beer-drinking faction editorial: The Sam Adams on tap puts it very high on the list, however.]
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El Paso, the restaurant that inspired the songs “Everything Here is Rather Large” and “Burrito Transplant Surgery”, is open again! Magpu celebrated last night with chips -> salsa, food.
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For lack of weird and strange news, I just want to inform everyone that we have been working on the web page a lot recently. There is a great setlist scanning tool that Cliff has been working on. Due to Brian’s computer dying, we need to reconstruct our mailing list. I have improved the mailing list link on the page to actually work. Please go there and sign in again so that we can keep you informed of all the new events in PU land. Also check out the band info page again. We have been trying to post all of the great information about us that you have been dying to know
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There was no severe weather threatening Thursday’s Club Dada show, though there was a total lunar eclipse which coincided with Magpu’s set. You might even say we made the moon disappear. This cosmic alignment of the sun, the earth, and the moon led to various technical problems during the beginning of the set. Some things couldn’t be heard at all, and others could be heard a bit too well.
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We are considering changing our name to something involving rain dancing, since rainstorms during Magpu shows seem to have become a regular occurrence. Monday’s show at Club Dada featured bright flashes of lightning, as well as power outages within the club and up and down Elm Street. Power continued flowing to the stage and the mixing console for most of the evening, however. Late in the evening, after a half-hour jam that included an impromptu approximation of “Dark Star” by the Grateful Dead, the entire club lost power, bringing the show to an abrupt halt. After all, it’s hard to play electric trance-fusion without electricity. This performance marked the first live appearance of the Magpu quintet, with the addition of Cliff on MalletKAT. It was also the first live Internet broadcast of Magpu, though the storm caused some problems with the transmission.
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Project Pu has landed! Magpu began recording several extended jam sessions, venturing into uncharted musical territory with no pre-defined plan or structure. Cliff McCarthy joined in on MalletKAT to enhance the mayhem. The best moments of the nearly three hours of music recorded Sunday and the follwing Tuesday are being mixed down by Terry and will be assembled on a CD to be available in the future.
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Saturday’s show at Home opening for the Disco Biscuits showed a curious relationship between the various instruments of Magpu and the force of gravity. The gravitational pull on Kurt’s keyboards was so strong that one of them “took a stage dive” according to him. Meanwhile, just a few feet away, Terry’s drums were practically floating, moving farther and farther away with every bass drum beat. Terry blamed it on the expansion of the Universe, figuring that since he is the center of the known universe, all things including drums must be moving away from him at all times. He expounded this theory at the top of his lungs after the first song, knowing that the audience too was getting farther away every second. At the opposite end of the stage where Brian was set up, the force of gravity again became excessive, repeatedly bringing his foot down prematurely onto the wrong effects switch. Kyle the Gian Bass Player (tm) seemed to be the only one unaffected by these mysterious gravitational fluctuations. The immense gravity produced by His Giantness was probably a stabilizing force in his part of the stage.
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Two days of Magpu recording sessions at the “Remote Rock & Roll Research Laboratory” (tm) a.k.a. Terry and Moop’s Plano Palace yielded the beginnings of “Wonder” and our magnum opus “Biscuit Willie” (which will be the “American Pie” of the late 1990’s according to Terry). These recordings still need some overdubs and the application of a proprietary digital signal processing algorithm known as “Magputronics”. Magputronics takes tight, well played notes of any instrument and dislodges them from their comfortable rhythmic niche into the most awkward positions to approximate the performance of a nervous, half-drunk band on stage before a minimal rain-soaked audience thinking about their next day’s work. This is what gives our otherwise overwhelmingly technically correct recordings that “sloppy live” feel. We hope to have our first full-length CD available by the summer of 1999, if not sooner!
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Our show tonight at the Home Bar leads to the following philosophical question: If a snare drum fell in a forest of flying drumsticks, and the only creature around was a deaf mouse trapped in a monitor speaker, does the snare drum still fall? Or would the moon disappear?
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Our first demo cd “In the Land” is now available at shows for $7. Details will be on the merchandise page shortly.
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Magpu is opening for the amazing Strangefolk from Burlington, VT on Wednesday, Oct. 14 at Trees in Dallas. This will be our 2nd time opening for a national act, and it will be an amazing night of audio exploration. cover is only $4.
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Magpu has received our first “thanks but no thanks” postard from the North Texas Music Festival. We were obviously overqualified… :) We will be playing for the first time in Houston and Ft. Worth this fall, see the dates page for details.
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The Home Bar show scheduled for October 24 is cancelled, and has been rescheduled for Friday, November 6th. We are tentatively playing our first show in Houston at “Instant Karma” on Wednesday 10/21.
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Magpu will be playing our first weekend headlining show on Saturday, October 24 at the Home Bar in Dallas. Stay tuned for more shows this fall…
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Web page revamped as of today. We have just finished recording on our second official demo tape. This one contains studio versions of “so many hats” and “sqrahd” as well as a live-in-studio version of “amycalling” that clocks in at over 15 minutes. We will continue to record and hopefully a magpu cd will be in the works this fall. Look for us to start playing in Houston, Austin, College Station, Denton, and Ft. Worth this fall, in addition to our semi-regular appearances at the Home Bar in Dallas.
