Mason Bates’s work joyfully embraces a multiplicity of musical worlds. Though his background – studies with David Del Tredici and John Corigliano at the Juilliard School in New York, and a doctorate in composition from Berkeley – was solidly mainstream, Bates also worked as a DJ in the US and Europe, and has always refused to recognise genre barriers. His works move between the postminimalism of John Adams and Bang on a Can, the riffs and harmonies of jazz, the insistent rhythms of techno and the sampled sounds of electronica, and the way it comes together is hugely impressive. It’s music that seems to thrive on narrative, whether it’s the cameos that lie behind the vivid miniatures of The B Sides, or the images of the natural world – glaciers calving, Hurricane Katrina – that shape the four-movement Liquid Interface. All three pieces include electronics, and draw material from an enormous range of sources – one of the movements of Alternative Energy uses recordings made at the Fermilab particle collider in Illinois. There are the occasional kitschy moments, but most of all it’s music of tremendous imagination and finesse.
