|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
CD
|
|
RER SM7
|
"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."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2CD
|
|
RER SM2
|
"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."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
RER SM1
|
"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."
|