New DVDs, CDs, Cassettes, and other Goodies from:
A new CD store, called "Art Into Life" in Tochigi-ken, Japan, has a complete line of all McLean CDs and a few historic LPs as well. Email Shingo Aoyagi. Additionally , a brand new CD called "Electronic Landscapes" has just been released by the Japanese company EM Records.
On this page:
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and other goodies
Combining nature/cultural sound and visual media with technological innovation, international composer-performers Barton and Priscilla McLean energize their haunting, evocative images with virtuosic performance.
"The McLeans may be leading the way toward whatever lies beyond with their powerful organic/synthetic sound mixes..." Jim Aikin in Keyboard.
Special 4-CD Package: an offer you can't refuse
LISTEN TO MUSIC SAMPLES OF McLEAN MIX. Go to this site (Capstone Records), select "M" and scroll down to "McLean,", and pick one of several albums to get a sense of what the music sounds like.
Who are The McLean Mix (info on performances, residencies)?
Like his mentor, the maverick iconoclast Henry Cowell, Barton McLean has traveled the whole world of music, expanding his sonic palette and aural imagery while racking up the miles. Like his other mentor, architect and electronic pioneer Iannis Xenakis, McLean respects no boundaries between acoustic and electronic musicmaking; he is at home with a piano as with developing new software instruments (such as the Composers' Playpen).
With this diverse pedigree McLean is uniquely qualified to straddle the worlds of technology and wilderness. From the uncannily precise performance of the Petersburgh Electrophilharmonia (they are a synthetic ensemble after all) to the field recording of the Musician Wren, McLean's music integrates a large vision of nature in her manner of operation.
The album begins with the "Concerto: States of Being" for piano and electronic sounds. It is a virtuosic tour de force in which the "ensemble" follows the soloist rather than the other way around a nearly impossible feat in the real concert world.
Stark contrast is a constant feature of this album as the next offering, as "Ritual of the Dawn" illustrates. Flutes, clarinet, harp, percussion and piano combine in a seamless, evocative world where pulsative rhythmic ideas combine with dynamic outbursts, producing what Debussy might have created had he lived in the late 20th century.
"Demons of the Night" bring sus back to the realm of symphonic terror and leads us into McLean's most current concerns. "Magic at Xanadu" and "Ice Canyons" represent the latest explorations of McLean's venture into MAX/MSP software creation. They are classically balanced, mature works generated live in actual performances during his 2008 and 2010tours with his McLean Mix duo (along with his wife Priscilla).
The final work, "Rainforest Images II," is described by McLean as his most sophisticated work in any genre. Being a hybrid of studio compositionand live performance with voices, experimental woodwinds, and keyboards using as sources rainforest sounds recorded on three continents, all assembled in McLean's studio, :Rainforest Images II" is all-embracing in its sonic breadth, emotional scope, and performance versatility. And the mystical ending is to make one weep, with voices trailing against theevocative drone, accompanied by the exquisite Musician Wren, recorded in the Amazon jungle.
With Barton McLean as your guide you will have a muddy and heady tour of his elegant soundworlds.
Innova Recordings has an excellent web site with reviews and other graphics of this album. Go to:
http://www.innova.mu/artist1.asp?skuID=423#onesheet
Barton and Priscilla McLean: Electronic Landscapes (EM1060CD) $21.00
This is a very special CD, assembled with infinite care (as
only the Japanese can do) by the legendary Koki Emura of
EM Records. Some of its unusual
aspects are:
The Music:
1. - 3. Priscilla McLean: Invisible Chariots
1. Voices of the Invisible (6:20)
2. Archangels (8:38)
3. Chariots (6:51)
4. Barton McLean: Song of the Nahuatl (17:02)
5. Barton McLean: Valley of Lost Dreams from Visions of a Summer Night (9:30)
6. Barton McLean: Journey on a Long String (11:48)
7. Priscilla McLean: Angels of Delirium (13:33)
See several new great reviews
RAINFOREST
IMAGES (Capstone CPS 8617 CD)
$8.00
"...a lush, wetly dripping, sonorous aural environment that really is evocative..." Music in New Zealand.
"...a powerful CD..." Journal Seamus
"...the almost 50-minute-long title track, which contains five movements, utilizes processed vocals and birdcalls, strings, wooden recorders, clariflute, the aboriginal Australian instrument didgeridoo,interspersed with ghostly chanted texts from native American wintu myth...startling showcases of powerful, nature-inspired music." Today, Manila, Philippines
GODS, DEMONS,
and the EARTH (Capstone CPS 8622 CD) $8
"Instruments used include the Burgess Shale Zylophone, (pre-Cambrian rocks with a beautiful clear bell-like sound), the inherently microtonal clariflute (a clarinet mouthpiece on a recorder body), percussion, a full range of digital synthesizers and processors, samples of a wide range of animal and human sounds, and Priscilla's virtuosic voice.As in their previous album, "Rainforest Images," the music is Romantic in conception, orchestral in texture, and contemporary in its sound world. Thick textures of orchestral samples, animal sounds, and electronic timbres are mixed and manipulated with a very clear sense of narrative, and a dramatic, gestural sense clearly related to the symphonic tradition. Throughout the album, the quality of the sound used is outstanding, many of the sounds and mixes having absolutely luscious timbres. All together, a very satisfying album". Warren Burt in Experimental Musical Instruments
The Music:
The McLean Mix Compact Discs & Cassettes Heading ~ The McLean Mix Performances Heading ~ How to contact The McLean Mix ~ Table of Contents
THE ELECTRIC
PERFORMER (Capstone CPS-8637 CD) $8
The best of the McLeans' works for instrument and tape, including three award-winning (Bourges Prize, IMC-Rostrum-UNESCO in 1983, Keyboard Magazine's "Best Pieces of the 70's", etc.) works and featuring the monumental piano/tape set The Inner Universe. These five works span two decades (1974-1996) and include performers such as David Burge, Albert Regni, Gerald Farmer, and The McLean Mix, and garnering warm praise from such critics and publications as John Rockwell (NY Times), David Burge, Audio Magazine, Keyboard, Winds Quarterly, Musical America, Fanfare, The Manchester Guardian, American Record Guide, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, etc.
The Music:
The McLean Mix and the Golden Age of Electronic Music (CRI CD 764) Composers Recordings Inc $8
"The Golden Age" refers to the period of
the 70's , with many fascinating works being created when analog synthesizers
and related instruments were at their most powerful. The McLeans were at
the forefront of this era, producing albums such as the two seminal Folkways
releases "Electronic Music from the Outside In" and "Computer Music from
the Outside In," which were (and still are) used extensively in college courses.
This album gathers together on one CD the very best of this electroacoustic
music from 1974-80 spanning eight McLean Mix LP albums (all now out of print)
on Folkways and CRI, including works on the two "outside in" releases,
all completely revised and brought up to contemporary digital standards.
Synthesizers heard on this album include the Synthi 100, Serge, Electrocomp,
Wavemaker and Arp. Most of these works have already become classics
in the electronic music literature and have been cited repeatedly in textbooks
and articles. If you want to hear the very best of what it was like before
MIDI and the polyphonic keyboards, when it all came together, this is it!
The Music:
Price: $8
Priscilla McLean is especially noted
for her innovative, compelling music for voice and instruments/synthesizer.
This album contains her most compelling vocal work, garnered from a lifetime
of work with the voice.
Comment from Canary Burton, Producer of The Latest Score on WOMR-FM, Provincetown, MA: " ...When I pulled out all the music I'd gathered over 4 years of my show, your albun "Fantasies for Adults and Other Children" is in the BEST of the BEST group.
Price: $58
From the haunting "Ritual of the Dawn" for six players to the hilarious "Happy Days" performed by the McLean Mix on music boxes, party instruments, happy apple, etc., to the title work "Forgotten Shadows," this album represents the aspect of Barton McLean that most involves people, in their joys and sorrows, through celebration and ritual. "Ritual of the Dawn" is the most - performed of the huge choral-instrumental tableax "Mysteriesfrom the Ancient nahuatl," and is ably performed by members of the Syracuse Society of new Music. It is both evocative and dramatic in turn, and shows the virtuosity of this fine ensemble.
The 39 - minute "Forgotten Shadows" is a symphonic work involving orchestral electronics, narration, "old time" performers on musical saw, fiddle, ragtime piano, church choirs, bell choirs, music boxes, along with sounds of children playing, old time Fourth of July celebrations, marching bands, etc. It takes the listener back to an earlier era of the early 1900's, and in a collage technique blends songs of that era with very contemporary techniques. It soars to a grand climax and subsides with the plaintive thought uttered by one of the elder narrators chosen for her memory of the old times and the authenticity of her voice -- "That's all gone now -- you can't hardly see where it is."
"Happy Days" concludes the album in a lighter manner, with music boxes, party instruments, flexatones, and some wild gestures toward the New year.
(see above) also on audiocassette (48 minutes) from MLC Productions, without the other two works. $8
On cassette from MLC Productions.
$7
Commissioned by the Bowling Green State U. Festival of New Music in 1985, and taken on tour by the McLean Mix for five years afterwards, this 5-movement work encompasses solo voice, native eskimo chant, woodwinds, percussion, two choirs, digital processing, electronic music instruments, and nature sounds running the gamut from wolves to Australian Black Swans to glacial streams, spiced with narrative from texts by Thoreau, Muir, Wordsworth, etc. An all-encompassing experience with experimental sound and nature.
"...performance virtuosity and the evocative and dramatic nature of the music..." Michael Kimmelman, NY Times. "The primitive momentum of these sound layers had its own cumulative power, and one eventually got swept up. Maybe we need these voices from the wilderness." Kyle Gann in The Village Voice. "...a strange intangible work of haunting beauty...the right music in the right place." Jason Cunliffe in Ear Magazine
CDCM Computer Music Series, Vol. 7 Centaur CD # CRC 2047. $18. Barton McLean: "A Little Night Musician" and "Demons of the Night" from "Visions of a Summer Night". Ethereal, evocative, dramatic music. This compact disc also Contains music of Rolnick, Oliveros, Kabat, Chadabe.
American Electronic Music CRI LP #335. . A seminal, historical LP on with Priscilla McLean's "Dance of Dawn" and Barton McLean's "Spirals". Produced in 1974, still fresh, garnering rave reviews in Audio, High fidelity, etc. Cited as one of "CRI's 10 best" by High Fidelity Magazine. SInce this is a collectors item, it will periodically appear on ebay auctions. Inquire about this.
Table of Contents ~ Ordering Information on CDs ~ McLean Mix performances
Prices of all CDs include all shipping and handling. We accept personal or institutional checks, made out to "Barton or Priscilla McLean." Please do not make out to "The McLean Mix." We also accept purchase orders and Paypal (including credit cards through Paypal). Personal checks must be received before the items can be sent out. All payments must be made in US dollars. . All items are in stock and will be sent out immediately upon receipt of check or purchase order. We also accept institutional email purchase orders or emails. We do not accept fax orders.
Send purchase orders or a check (made out to Barton or Priscilla McLean) to: Barton & Priscilla McLean, 55 Coon Brook Road, Petersburg, NY, 12138. Phone: (518) 658 3595. Email orders with a PO number are acceptable.
We are offering the Capstone items above at a special price when purchased as a set of four, for $14 plus mailing costs (which would amount to $17.85 total). Just specify "Special 4-CD offer" when you order. For purchase orders, add $5.
LISTEN TO MUSIC SAMPLES OF McLEAN MIX. Go to this site (Capstone Records), select "M" and scroll down to "McLean,", and pick one of several albums to get a sense of what the music sounds like.
Full copies of all reviews, video, brochures available upon request, as are information on funding sources. Contact Address: #55 Coon Brook Road, Petersburg, NY, 12138, USA. Phone: (518) 658 3595
Links: Table of Contents / DVD catalog/Ordering Information / Special 4-CD Package / McLean Mix Performance Duo