Barton McLean relates:  My composer/performer wife (and soulmate) Priscilla McLean and I began the "Rainforest” project as an installation in 1989, premiering at the University of Wyoming, involving walk-in performance by the audience at any of our five music stations, using synthesizers, amplified bicycle wheel, and microphones, plus the evocative drones and rainforest sounds we had recorded in the field and arranged on our composed drone tape.

After dozens of installations and our Australian-New Zealand-Hawaii McLean Mix tour in 1990, we began thinking of an actual composition involving voices from around the world raised in song to the beauty of the rainforest.  This epic (48 minutes) work was a true mixture of styles, evoking the inner ambiance one experiences when walking through a rainforest, yet becoming a unified musical sound-world on its own.  After choosing the different taped improvisations, we recorded and integrated them with sampled and synthesized music.  Each of us would compose a section of the piece for a few days, then turn the reins over to the other, working seven days a week for six months.  This may be the first example in history of a true integrated composition by husband and wife working together!

"Rainforest II" is a modified distillation from the larger “Rainforest Images I” recording. The beginning, after a sultry introductory invitation by the Musician Wren and other Amazon birds, is primal and rawly pulsed, with Priscilla McLean and I performing on soprano recorders and me also performing on a clariflute (soprano recorder with a clarinet mouthpiece).  After a quiet interlude where the birds are prominent, the last powerfully reflective section closes with singing by Priscilla and chants by Panaiotis, vocalist and sound technician, who also provided much of the sound processing, realized in the Oliveros Foundation studio with its “Expanded Instrument System.”  The source sounds were recorded by Priscilla and myself in the Amazon jungle and throughout Australia.  In this work, I have tried very hard to strike a balance between keeping the beauty and integrity of the natural sounds intact, while at the same time incorporating them in an actual compositional framework in the same sense that any motivic material would be used, progressing as it does beyond soundscape, perhaps even antithetical to the soundscape esthetic, which tends to leave the environmental sounds intact.  This may be a bit unsettling at first to the listener, who, with repeated hearings, will hopefully hear less and less the individual nature sounds and more and more the integrity of the composition as a whole.  

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The 48' "Rainforest Images I" was recorded in 1994 on Capstone CPS 8617 CD. It has now been re-released on Ravello (Naxos). It is a defining work for the McLeans, having been recorded and produced on four continents (North/South America, Austrailia, New Zealand).

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The most recent addition to the Rainforest  collection is a YouTube video with the exact same music as Rainforest Images I (the 48 minute version) accompanied by dozens of spectacular images taken by the McLeans, mostly in their Borneo and Malaysia mainland residency.  The video component was produced and created by Priscilla.

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© & ℗ 1994, 2017 Barton & Priscilla McLean