Clairvoyant

Description

The tenth release in our Steve Maclean series and, as always, something completely different. This one is a retrospective. Made in the early 1980s these tracks immortalise Steve's early experiments with Roland's first guitar synthesizer (the GR500), as well as a very early boss drum machine, voices and a bank of Akai samplers. The aesthetic mixes elements of '80s electropop and film music with more intricate contrapuntal layerings - always rhythm-based, always stark and very organised. Approach it as a gallery of exploratory compositions that find what else the technology can do, some marked by unusual applications of processed voices - and many in which, while the sounds will be familiar enough, the way they are assembled defies expectation. That's one of the things that make this collection interesting - it shows how things might have been at a time when the pop aesthetic was failing to scratch below the surface of the new instrumentarium and unearth its more arresting possibilities - while still locating itself firmly in the world of instant musical accessibility. Steve started playing drums and guitar at seven and composing at twelve. Completing high school early, he met Roswell Rudd and they began playing concerts together in New York, where he took a job in a busy recording studio working in every genre. He became a fixture in the NYC "downtown" scene and joined Nick Didkovsky's Dr. Nerve - with whom he made a slew of records. In 1980 he scored for dance, performed his own compositions on PBS television and set up his own studio, producing award winning scores and doing sound design for hundreds of television and radio commercials, films and other multi-media projects. He co-founded the Portland Experimental Music Collective, established the Steve MacLean Ensemble and had compositions performed at numerous festivals. In 2000 he moved to Boston to become a professor in the Synthesis and Ensemble Departments at Berklee College of Music. He remains active as both composer and performer.