Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) and the San Francisco Symphony (SFS)  release a new recording featuring Bay Area composer Mason Bates’s three largest electro-acoustic orchestral works on SFS Media.

The album of Bates’s largest orchestral works features the first recordings of the SFS-commissioned The B-Sides and Liquid Interface, in addition to Alternative Energy. These three works illustrate Bates’s exuberantly inventive music that expands the symphonic palette with sounds of the digital age: techno, drum ‘n’ bass, field recordings and more, with the composer performing on electronica. MTT and the SFS have championed Bates’s works for over a decade, evolving a partnership built on multi-year commissioning, performing, recording, and touring projects.

“The three pieces on this album are my largest electro-acoustic works, my wildest explorations into the power of an expanded symphonic palette and its implications for imaginative new forms,” said Mason Bates. “The sounds range from glaciers to industrial techno to a NASA spacewalk. New sounds have often provoked new forms throughout music history… and I look to the digital world as an important twenty-first century expansion of the orchestral sound world.”

“Mason has an enormous imagination for extending and creating another vocabulary of sound,” said Michael Tilson Thomas. “It complements what he’s doing with his notes and bass lines and melodies. He blends these two aspects together, and it’s volatile and engaging.”

 Mason Bates writes music that fuses innovative orchestral writing, imaginative narrative forms, the harmonies of jazz and the rhythms of electronic dance music. Frequently performed by orchestras large and small, Bates has become a visible advocate for bringing new music to new spaces, whether through partnerships with Orchestras or through his Mercury Soul project which has transformed commercial spaces, clubs and concert halls into exciting, hybrid musical events. Bates was the recipient of the 2012 Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities. In presenting him with the award, Teresa Heinz remarked that “his music has moved the orchestra into the digital age and dissolved the boundaries of classical music.”