Recent Press Comments about McLean Mix Events
"There are very few contemporary composers who make their living from touring and performing their own music. The McLean Mix, consisting of Priscilla and Barton McLean, is, even within that small group, an even greater rarity a duo of composer/performers who make their living this way. Furthermore, they do this performing music that, while it does have a considerable popular appeal, is absolutely uncompromising in terms of artistic style. This contradicts the popular wisdom that one can only make money in the arts by giving people something they are familiar with." --Warren Burt, music/book reviewer and composer, Musicworks Magazine, Toronto, Spring 2006:
"The McLeans' music is based in an admiration for nature, but it's created using the most advanced electronic tools available. The combination is thus primitive and highly sophisticated at the same time. One critic described the experience of a McLean Mix concert as "getting close to the inner forces and rhythms of the Earth." In today's larger musical scene, the McLeans are as rare as a banjo in symphonic orchestra. Their music is as unique as the way they lead their career, which is with a remarkably low level of ego-driven ambition. "They follow their own star," says composer Joel Chadabe, who runs the Electronic Music Foundation in Albany. "Within the world of electronic music, thereare definitely conventions and norms. ... They don't fit (any of) them easily." The McLeans' music is characterized by an austere, often macabre resonance. The boundary between reality and the cyber world becomes slippery."__ Joseph Dalton in The Albany Times-Union (For the Full Review -- click here)
"The result is astonishing and often surprising..." Comment on Rainforest Images by New Straits Times, Singapore
"Thoughts of Charles Ives and the risks he often took with his music were in my mind throughout the March 4 Alternative Museum concert featuring Barton and Priscilla McLean as The McLean Mix...Using wilderness sounds (crickets, wolves, eskimos, etc.) as the principal sound material is just as dangerous as was Ives' use of 'banal' hymns and popular tunes of his day. It has never been easy for audiences to reconcile banality with classical tradition. The McLeans made it easier for the audience to cope through their performance virtuosity and the evocative and sometimes dramatic nature of the music." -- The New York Times
"Long known for their adventurous electronic scores, they have recently been staging an installation piece called "Rainfor -est" and a multimedia performance work, "Gods, Demons and the Earth", both with the intention of making provocative music and reminding audiences of the importance of keeping what's left of the natural world healthy." -- Keyboard
"Working within that philosophical realm (she refers to cage and Stockhausen) and creating some strikingly beautiful and meaningful music along the way, are Barton and Priscilla McLean." Deborah Parisi in Electronic Musician
"Jambori Rimba has provided a wonderfully creative artistic window for the Malaysian people to rexamine the relationship between their rainforest and its native population." -- commentary on RadioTV 1 Malaysia broadcast
(Rainforest) ..."a lush, wetly dripping, sonorous aural environment that really is evocative...sounds were all beautifully sampled and synthesized, and mixed with skill and understanding." -- Music in New Zealand
"...a strange but intriguing aural and visual experience." -- New York Times
"Priscilla's singing, replete with "extended vocal techniques," was more lyrical than Joan LaBarbara's, less hysterical than Cathy Berberian's, though potentially as unsettling as both. The evening was filled with ...gasps of insight and moments of frightening, uncontrolled beauty."-- The Village Voice
"Can high-tech electronics and the natural realm get along together? Yes, enchantingly, in the music of composers-performers Barton and Priscilla McLean."--San Antonio Express-News
"... all fused into a profound and memorable impression, bringing to a fitting close the constant theme of the concert and of the McLean's work in general--how one can get close to the inner forces and rhythms of the earth through sound and sight, enhanced through technology."--San Francisco Chronicle "Slowly both resonated into an eerie cascade of synthesizers that washed over the auditory faculties of everyone in the audience for several minutes. Together with visuals, it was like a surreal MTV from the darkest canopies of nature...thus shaping the dimensions of contemporary classical music as we know it today." Description of McLean Mix performance at Tunugan in Manila by Lourd Ernest H. de Veyra with a feature article in TODAY, Manila, Philippines | ||
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