"Mercury Soul Merges Visual Art with Classical Music & Electronica" SFWeekly (by Ezra Gale)
"Be it mixing trip-hop and funk at a club or writing a symphonic or chamber work, composer Mason Bates is getting noticed for his straddling of classical music and electronica. ... Young, Juilliard-trained and already celebrated, he's become a fixture not only in concert halls but in the world of electronica as well. At a time when symphony orchestras nationwide are trolling for audience magnets - the type of new material that can lure members of generations X and Y along with older subscribers - Bates just might have that bait."
-Los Angeles Times, "Concerto for Two Universes," by Donna Perlmutter
"Mason Bates, 30 years old...knows how to command an orchestra just as well as he does his touchpad. Bates's Liquid Interface, a National Symphony commission that received its world premiere last night, surpassed in sheer sonic beauty even the works by Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky that rounded out the program."
-The Washington Post, Andrew Lindemann Malone
"The Juilliard School, in its annual Focus! Festival, presented six evenings of works written in 2005, including ... Mason Bates' Digital Loom, for organ and electronics, which transformed the hall into something between a decaying cathedral and an East Berlin club."
-The New Yorker, Alex Ross
"Morgan led the world premiere of Icarian Rhapsody, an appealingly crafted work for strings by Oakland composer Mason Bates ... lovely to hear and ingeniously constructed...
-San Francisco Chronicle, Joshue Kosman
"Eventually, someone was bound to grow up so immersed in genre-mixing that they would get both sides of the equation right. Bates has. ...The most impressive thing is how comfortably his two idioms mix."
-Symphony Magazine, "The Bilingualist," by Kyle Gann 
"... [Sounds For His Animation, for synthesizer & orchestra] opens with music for the beginning of time - an isolated, eerie harmonic note from the violins, which the synthesizer mimics and then turns into a whale cry before passing back. Before the first movement ends, Bates' point about the synthesizer has become clear: It is all instruments and unique at once, first chasing the strings over light passages, then blending with the horns, and finally soaring above them all with an electronic sound familiar to anyone who has heard the techno music of nightclubs...
...Bates' concerto was well received by the audience, which burst into conversation along with its applause."
-Atlanta Constitution Journal, Deborah Geering
"With rubber washers, pencil erasers and screws placed strategically in the Steinway's strings, the trio presented String Band,for violin, cello and prepared piano, a rhythmic, lyrical work composed for the ensemble by 27-year-old Mason Bates. Kwong created faint Irish clogging sounds, bell tones and muted gongs to accompany the pitch-bending melody in the strings."
-Washington Post, Grace Jean
"And never has a Beethoven's Ninth Symphony been so colored by the music that preceded it on the program. Mason Bates' Ode , commissioned by the Phoenix Symphony, takes the argument of the Beethoven and turns it backward ... So that when the Beethoven begins, and plays the music in the proper order, we have a different take on it."
-Arizona Republic
"Take Mason Bates' Digital Loom for organ and electronics...Definitely a voice from the younger generation, Bates reimagines the king of instruments as a surreal creature inventing its own space, the illuminated stops flashing like an enormous pinball machine and presided over by the organist as D.J. who programs wild sequences of hip-hop, funk, and ambient electronica."
-New York Magazine, Peter Davis
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Mason Bates / Masonic : electronica and classical composer in San Francisco, Mason Bates is a member of Young Concert Artists. Official site of Mason Bates / Masonic (DJ and electronica / techno artist). ©2003 by Mason Bates / Masonic.
