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7CD
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RER SMB1
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$36.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 9/12/2025
"To encourage you, here are seven CDs for the price of two: Frog, Bug, Guitar, Computer (featuring what it says in the title); Prime; GPS (Steve MacLean Ensemble's final CD), Year of the Dragon, (featuring Chris Cutler); Bridges (double CD) and Ordinary Objects and Other Distractions (musical manipulations of toys and everyday objects) -- PLUS the great-and-long-out-of-print Radial Circuit (polyrhythmic instrumental band compositions) -- in a sturdy box. Steve MacLean is a musician, composer, producer, and engineer known for his work with music technology, particularly in the early 1980s. He is also a professor in the Electronic Production and Design department at Berklee College of Music (retired). Early in his career, MacLean gained experience with early digital audio and music production tools like the Fairlight CMI, DX-7, Linn Drum, and automated mixing consoles in a NYC recording studio. He has been actively performing and composing for over 30 years. Briefly a member of Nick Didkovsky's Dr Nerve, MacLean then co-founded the Portland Experimental Music Collective, formed his own quartet (with Tim Inman on keyboards, Jim McGirr on bass, and Dave Fields on drums) and released the all-instrumental album The Opposite of War (ReR, 1999). The lively chamber jazz-rock music of Windows Pt 2 and Windows Pt 1 is modulated by a frenzy of tempo shifts, with more than a hint of Frank Zappa's influence. The other tracks, notably 'Branches,' walk a fine line between lounge music, minimalist repetition, neoclassical passages, and exotic rhythms. The double-CD Bridges (2007) compiles works spanning two decades and several styles, from the mechanic ballet No Jazz (1989) to the King Crimsonian prog rock of One Little Life (2001). Its second disc, devoted to electronic experiments, runs the gamut from ambient music to musique concrete."
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CD
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RER SM8
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$15.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 9/12/2025
"A collection of new pieces that range across media and genres, mostly exploring prime numbers and the overtone series and featuring various guitars, a grand piano (played and remote-controlled), a quiet drum station, tube bells, assorted percussion, an amplified wire with an Echoplex, a modular synthesizer system -- and Moog, Roland, Korg and Smith synths. Also featuring bassoon, five-string bass and drums on various tracks. There are tuneful polyrhythmic compositions, timbre-based works, atmospheric meditations, film-music and some exquisite manipulations of sound. This is Steve's ninth CD on ReR Megacorp and in some ways usefully bridges the wide variety of styles and media that have marked his compositions to date. Meticulously produced and mastered. A retired Professor in the Electronic Production and Design Dept at Berklee College of Music, Steve MacLean is a guitarist, composer, producer, and engineer, he has been evolving with music technology since the early '80s, when he worked in a New York City recording studio and had hands-on with early versions of the Fairlight CMI, DX-7, Linn Drum, mixing consoles and digital audio samplers. Later, he founded his own recording and production studio and produced/engineered hundreds of artists and numerous award- winning projects including scores for over two hundred commercials and soundtracks as well as a constant artistic output of his own works. An active performer and composer for over 35 years, including numerous concerts with Roswell Rudd, Chris Cutler, MeRCy, Steve MacLean Ensemble and a host of Boston-based improvisers, Steve was co-founder of the Portland Experimental Music Collective, has performed original compositions at numerous new music festivals, including several pieces for New Music Across America and similar events. An innovator in the new music circuit, he was curator for a series of concerts '2001 New Music Odyssey,' and continues to release recordings internationally on ReR Megacorp and others."
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CD
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RER SM7
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"In this episode, a number of short recordings of household objects and curious instruments become the core thematic material for a range of exquisitely conceived and realised pieces in which the recordings are shaped, stretched, tuned, combined and otherwise manipulated before being folded into a variety of musical structures with additional elements or parts added. Much use is made of rhythms derived from gravity - that is, dropping and bouncing - embedded into microtonal, poly-rhythmic and deeply engaging structures. Steve has been a hard sell in some ways, like Jon Rose, Biota and Bob Drake. But we think that, in the end, quality will out."
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2CD
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RER SM2
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"Steve MacLean began playing drums and guitar at the age of seven and composing at twelve. Completing high school early, he met Roswell Rudd and began playing concerts with him in New York. He moved to the city and took a job in a busy recording studio, working with cutting edge artists of every genre and spending his free time moving around the NYC 'downtown' free improvisation scene. He soon joined Nick Didkovsky's Dr. Nerve and made a slew of records. By 1980 he was scoring for dance, performing his own compositions on PBS's New Music Directions series, and setting up his own studio, which over the next two decades produced award-winning scores and sound design for hundreds of TV and radio commercials, films and disparate multi-media projects. Between times he co-founded the Portland Experimental Music Collective, established his own permanent ensemble and had compositions performed at numerous festivals. He moved to Boston in 2000 to take up a professorship in the Synthesis and Ensemble Departments at Berklee College of Music. He continues regularly to perform composed and improvised music -- alone, with a student ensemble and in numerous projects with Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, Nick Didkovsky, Ken Field, Chris Cutler, Jonathan LaMaster, Eric Rosenthal, and others. The recordings on this double CD collect together works spanning two decades of composition and experimentation. They balance traditional musical resources (the band, compositional skills, instrumental techniques, acoustic and amplified instruments) with the new technologies (computers, signal processing, sampling and recording software). The first showcases the kind of signature polyrhythmic, precise, instrumental compositions familiar from his last ReR CD, Opposite Of War, while the second is more meditative, abstract and electronic, moving from acoustic koto through electric and acoustic guitars -- with and without radical effects processing -- to piano and virtual orchestra."
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RER SM1
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"Steve Maclean is a US guitarist, once a member of Doctor Nerve, whose quartet specializes in austere neo-classical rock chamber music of great subtlety. The music is strictly composed with single-minded seriousness. Time signatures abound, but more important are the constantly shifting building blocks of interlocking rhythms; at times each player is pursuing independent lines and different rhythmic cells which magically build up the whole. Fans of early Henry Cow and Hatfield and the North will also recognize the myriad lines which scurry back & forth around the ensemble."
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