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These recordings demonstrate two different approaches to merging electronic media into the traditionally acoustic world of Western art music. American DJ/composer Mason Bates uses electronics to reimagine both the sound world and topics of symphonic music. Mexican ambient artist Fernando Corona, who performs under the name Murcof, reimagines existing piano works through electronic layers and processing.
San Francisco Symphony's Mason Bates: Works for Orchestra is devoted solely to Bates, whose career has benefitted from the support of music director and conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. In January and September 2014, Tilson, the San Francisco Symphony, and Bates on electronica recorded his three multi-movement symphonies live at Davies Symphony Hall: Liquid Interface (2007), The B-Sides (2009), and Alternative Energy (2011). Bates explains that these three works are his "wildest explorations into the power of an expanded symphonic palette and its implications for imaginative new forms" (4). In these works, Bates is judicious in his use of electronics, with some movements or large portions of movements containing none at all.
The B-Sides captures five distinct sound worlds, starting with "Broom of the System," which conveys through an incessant rhythm and the sound of a sweeping broom, a chimney sweep keeping the dust off "the circuit boards of our lives" (5). By contrast, "Aerosol Melody (Hanalei)" is more spacious and melodic; this movement contains no electronica, relying on the contrast and coordination within the orchestra to portray relaxation at the beach. The third movement, "Gemini in the Solar Wind," brings the listener to space through NASA audio samples from the Gemini IV voyage of 1965. The orchestra creates a mood of anticipation and tension appropriate to the great space age of the 1960s. "Temescal Noir" shifts to jazz rhythms and riffs inspired by the Oakland neighborhood of the title, with a sonic nostalgia captured by the typewriter and oil drum rhythms. "Warehouse Medicine" brings the listener to Detroit warehouse parties of the 1990s through a pounding techno beat.
Bates calls Liquid Interface "a water symphony." "Glaciers Calving" opens with field recordings of breaking Antarctic glaciers, but soon the orchestra captures the motion of the glaciers and slow trip-hop beats reflect the cracking. "Scherzo Liquido" samples water droplets...