Over seven years ago, in 2016, I set a goal for myself of writing and recording an EP each month. This was the year I turned 30 and I was feeling stagnant in my songwriting process and felt an ambitious goal would jumpstart my creativity. Before this year I was mostly a guitar and keyboard player, with only a small amount of dabbling with synthesizers. I had purchased a Teenage Engineering OP-1 the fall before and planned to use this instrument as the core of my creative process. The ability to record 4-track loops on the OP-1 was invaluable to this project. The most common process was to record some loops throughout the month before importing them into Logic Pro where I would arrange, write lyrics and record vocals, and mix the final tracks in a frenzy near the end of each month.

Obviously things went a little off the rails in 2016. This was also the year that my partner and I moved to Amsterdam (for the first time) and we spent a lot of the year bouncing back and forth from Portland, OR and the Netherlands. This was also the year that our soon-to-be 45th President spent campaigning on a message of hatred and vitriol that emboldened white supremacists online and in public spaces. This feeling of hopelessness, seeing the mask pulled off from the white supremacist institutions of the US, and the personal upheaval felt in navigating a new place as an immigrant, all culminated in a lot of thoughts and words in each of these EPs.

This collection of tracks is not necessarily cohesive, but if you have the patience, maybe it tells a story about a year of my life and the world in a way that no other media could. Or maybe it’s just a lot of filler to slog through. Either way, I’m presenting it here in an archival release format for posterity.

Thanks to everyone who listened along with me through this project, I appreciate each and every one of you!

<3, Mark

Some notes about each EP:

Jan 2016 - JANUS
A synth-heavy release recorded while in a crappy Airbnb in Amsterdam we lived in for 3 months while visiting on a tourist visa. Baritone vocals and big synth basslines. FFO Human League, Depeche Mode, etc.

Feb 2016 - PURE
Guitars enter the picture on this one. Very post-punk with a lot of influence from The Fall, Television, etc. I barely remember recording this one, but “Sundaze” is the hit song IMO.

Mar 2016 - WAR MYTH
Recorded after a trip to Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina, I saw a lot of parallels between the ethnic tensions that led to war in the 90s there (the residual effects of that which were still quite visible) and the cultural cold war that was ramping up in the US. Musically, I think this the EP where the “Magical Trash” sound starts to coalesce a bit more. It’s got the punky tracks, it’s got a couple of synth-pop tracks, and it’s got the “weird” track.

Apr 2016 - TRUCKWORLD
After our tourist visa for the Schengen area expired, we headed back to the US to spend the summer while we got our paperwork in order to officially emigrate to the Netherlands. We stayed with some friends in Beaverton, a suburb outside of Portland, and the cultural whiplash I felt being (re)situated in suburban America drove the primary topics on this one. The vibe gets heavy and I started getting more comfortable adding noise as an element.

May 2016 - HERE
This is probably the most consistent release in the series. I began using the OP-1’s FM radio to pore through Christian radio stations to find sample fodder, in an attempt to recontextualize my own evangelical upbringing and to better understand my own relationship to the darker foundations of American culture. Musically, it’s all over the place. It doesn’t adhere to a genre, which at this point became one of the points of Magical Trash as a project.

Jun 2016 - MODERNITY
I can tell I was having more fun on this one. We moved back to Amsterdam at some point in this month and that amount of distance from the US news cycle, and the excitement of returning to a new city, resulted in a slightly more upbeat feeling. A lot of the lyrics are almost self-helpy, with mantras about holding fast to your inner energy and don’t let the bastards beat it out of you. Also, as far as personal favorites from this project go: “Gotta Gotta” is so much fun to me. It’s maybe the closest I’ll get to writing a Chad VanGaalen song.

Jul 2016 - TIME
Before this year, I had only listened to a bit of electronic music. Getting into more synthesizer-based composition was exciting and this EP was my first attempt at an electronic music release. There are no vocals, only samples and synths. Very indebted to Oneohtrix Point Never in many places. This is one of my favorite EPs from the entire year.

Aug 2016 - POWER
After the electronic EP, I ricocheted back 100% in the other direction and recorded a mostly guitar and drum based post-punk EP. Lyrics are bleak and sardonic, lots of weird time signatures and rhythms. There’s still the “weird” track on here too, which was meant as a bit of a palate cleanser. I would still love to make a band using this EP as a starting point.

Sep 2016 - BORDER
This EP started as an attempt to write a post-punk/krautrock/prog epic 10+ minute track. The song’s imagery is heavily inspired by the Area X trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer and it covers a lot of ground musically. Another personal favorite track is “Scrubbers”, which is heavily indebted to Brainiac in a way that I’m usually too uptight to perform. Closer “Ought” performs a fun trick of switching from guitar/drum production to synth production mid-track before dissolving into ambience.

Oct 2016 - DESYNC
Recording this many EPs in one year and dumping that much thought into the lyrics every month had me feeling pretty burnt out by this point in the year. To unwind at night I was live-performing ambient loops on the OP-1 with a delay pedal in our living room and getting a lot of enjoyment from the process. To give myself (and anyone still listening) a bit of a mental break, I decided to record some of these sessions and release that for the month. It’s 45 minutes long, so not really an “EP” in any normal sense, but perfect for clearing the mind.

Nov 2016 - THINKPIECE
Ending the year on a bang. Some of the heaviest punkest tracks of the year paired with a couple of weird experiments and a krautrock track. We went to bed one night thinking one person would be the President, and woke up the next morning into the alternate reality where the other candidate won. It felt shocking, and even now seven years later it feels like some sort of weird bad dream. It’s incredible that the institutions in the US are so fragile that this one-term President did irreparable damage for at least the next generation (even more incredible is that the “opposition” party has done almost nothing to counter in any materially significant way). Anyways, thank you for making it this far.

Dec 2016 - COVERS
I was tired of writing my own music, so I did a few cover songs with wildly varying genre markers.