What This Is:

I asked as many people as possible to review the same album for this issue. My idea was to showcase the essential and inescapable subjectivity of criticism, and to that end I chose a challenging record: The Purging Trilogy, a two-hour-long avant-guitar album by guitarist Mick Barr. The record is split into three parts: Ixoltion, Sacreth, and Hymns. As I expected, every assertion put forth in one of these reviews is contradicted in another, and above all every reviewer displayed their personal style of criticism.

Pete Noteboom
It’s a massive translucent pirate ship filled with damned souls holding scimitars cutting through the clouds. It’s a gigantic zeppelin exploding in mid-air amid a hail of flaming comets. It’s a young boy watching from the mountains with mouth agape as extraterrestrials decimate his small village with huge futuristic laser beams. It’s the dark matter that holds universes together. It’s high, high above you. It’s exhilarating electric narcolepsy. It’s a new kind of Raga. It’s long, it’s challenging, it’s natural. It’s guitars!!!!!!!!!

Smudge
Mick Barr’s solo effort under the name Ocrilim is almost two and a half hours of mediocre musicianship, slow and self-indulgent guitar noodling, and redundant harmonies. The whole thing reminds me of the posthumous J Dilla record Donuts in that it sounds like pages haphazardly ripped out of a musician’s sketchbook; no song sounds complete. I can only think that the title of this record comes from the feeling Barr got when he finally vomited out all of the musical refuse deep in his gut. The Purging Trilogy isn’t abrasive enough to be noise rock or desolate enough to be drone or doom metal; this is an interlude in background noise.

Andrew Bergstrom
I was very impressed by The Purging Trilogy, a composition from the mind of Mick Barr. Multilayered tracks of guitar grind and shred a wordless tale; the more-than-two-hour-long trilogy sounds like an opera for guitar, and Barr’s insane speed and somewhat spastic playing style evoke the stage performance of Paganini, who played as though possessed. Though it may be difficult to appreciate on the first listen, the album is wonderfully executed, epic and welcome push on the boundaries of music and of art.

Kevin Tully
The set-up of this set of records is simple: it’s basically 2 hours and 12 minutes of one dude playing guitar. Now, I’m totally in awe of anyone that can see a project of that magnitude to completion—that’s fucking impressive, I don’t care what you’re into—but is appreciating this behemoth the same as enjoying it? I understand why people like heavy-handed experimental musicians like Ocrilim, and if this sort of music is your thing then you’re gonna love The Purging Trilogy. It’s just not my thing. I’m not asking for the two hours of my life I spent listening to it back, I’m just saying that I probably wouldn’t do it again.

Angela Sanders
For an album that is over two hours long, not a whole lot happens. The Purging Trilogy is a huge undertaking for the listener, and while I can appreciate Barr’s technical skills as a guitarist, I cannot help but be dissatisfied with the product as a whole. “Ixoltion” and “Sacreth” have a constant drone in the background and not much layered on top of it. “Hymns” had some variety, but the technical aspect had lost its intrigue and I felt like I was listening to my life just hum by. Music should be more engaging than that.

Eric Brew
The Purging Trilogy is like eating processed, organic sugar straight from the packaging. It’s difficult to put into words: it’s absurdly satisfying as it’s being consumed, but in retrospect you realize you probably shouldn’t have eaten it; your tastebuds are shocked. Everything will taste flat for a while. Mick Barr’s sense of timing is incredible, and the depth of his compositions calls for every listener’s veneration of his talent. The structure can also be overwhelming if you pay too close attention. It can feel over-processed, as if Barr were a supercomputer calculating his next lick according to data pulled from an impressionist painting. Barr is obsessed with pattern and arrangement that can be too redolent of sugar and salt crystals at times.

Sam Johnston
In the time it takes to listen to The Purging Trilogy I can listen to “Bad Romance” 27 times, but fate has other plans for me.  With the first searing chord of “Ixolition” the walls of my house are blown down and there before me hovers, impossibly, Ocrilim himself, illuminated only by a thousand orbs of mythical energy floating upward against the pull of gravity.  He reaches toward me and issues a single command, “Take my hand, slave, and let us be free.”  I have no choice but to comply.

Zach McCormick
These songs, while all virtuosic and technical and lofty, aren’t that engaging. Great playing simply does not equal a great album, and this record will only appeal to diehard genre fans, who will probably love it because it’s a masterpiece. Everyone else is going to run in horror away from the mental sandpaper that is layer upon layer of buzzing, treble-heavy guitar constantly switching tempo. If Rachmaninov had been raised in a stoner metal band, this is probably what he would have come up with.

Natalie Heath
If I were to make a movie about a cat trying to escape from a paper bag that has been set on a conveyor belt inching toward some sort of giant smashing device, I would choose Ocrilim’s Purging Trilogy as the soundtrack. And this is no ordinary cat on its way to certain death; this is like the greatest cat, you love this cat, and you care deeply that it escapes. The intensity and scratchiness of Ocrilim’s like 200 guitars would provide the perfect musical narrative for my gruesome cat death movie: the movement of the guitars would correspond to the wild movements of the cat and the whole thing would probably say something really profound about the futility of struggle; I mean, this paper bag is really thick and cats aren’t that strong.

Sage Dahlen
This album could be described as a soundtrack to a torrential rainstorm, or a migraine headache. It’s long, full of self-indulgent, unremarkable noodling with some badass grunge and metal riffs interspersed. (I’ll save you some time: the best track is part 3 of “Sacreth.”) The Trilogy, however, is not long in an I-want-my-life-back way, because it never fully holds your attention. You can troll around on the Internet or make dinner while Mick Barr twiddles his fingers over guitar strings.

Peter Starkebaum
It all starts with a pain-bearing, angst-spiked guitar. In this horror there is an attraction; the notes feel sensitive and bare, like an open nerve being sliced. A sense of relief comes in Sacreth when the percussion grounds the relentless shredding; the album’s chaotic mood finds stability. And then come the hymns like a ghostly reflection of the first two segments, ending the album with a feeling of completeness and distinct direction. The Purging Trilogy provokes perspective and true emotion, but if someone asked me if I enjoyed it, I would have to say that it was like picking a scab: it took some cold shivers and necessary pain to get in to the warm, sensitive and bloody.

Michael Hessel-Mial
I am a tourist. I went to one of those steakhouses where you eat a 64-ounce steak and get a free shirt. I thought it would be easy. Instead, I ate about four ounces and passed out next to the baked potato. That’s how I feel about this album; it’s too damn long. But delicious.

Deniz Rudin
At its best The Purging Trilogy is stark and mythic, gigantic and cold. If you distilled all the high points of the record—the longing of the opening riff of “Sacreth 4”, the meditative grief of the first two perfect hymns, the ecstatic triumph of the melodic sections of “Ixoltion 1”—into one hour-long thing, it would be an absolutely incredible album, but for every piece of the record that I love, there is a corresponding misstep. Mick Barr is possessed of genius, but like most prolific artists he is undiscerning; he churns out two and a half hours of music and in it are both masterstrokes and mediocrities, often within the same song. In The Purging Trilogy Barr shows his potential to craft emotionally affecting music, but he hasn’t figured it out quite yet.

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Watch Mick Barr play guitar: