A BURNING MIXTAPE Features Songs From BURNING MAN: THE MUSICAL

Just in time for this year's annual Burning Man festival, on August 22, 2016, writer Matt Werner and composer Gene Back are releasing "A Burning Mixtape," a collection of the first 14 songs from Burning Man: The Musical for free online at BurningManTheMusical.com.

The songs form a song cycle of music from the first half of Burning Man: The Musical, and satirize the wealthy Silicon Valley billionaires who jet into Burning Man and use the festival as their summer playground. In the spirit of HBO's show "Silicon Valley," songs such as "How Fast Can You Fail?" and "Man Jose" poke fun at the male dominated tech culture in the San Francisco Bay Area. The song "Ayahuasca Tea Ceremony" mocks the use of hallucinogens tech executives use to come up with new product ideas.

The album features electronic dance music (EDM) throughout, but there are folk songs that hearken back to the '60s, such as the Bob Dylan inspired "Last Year's Burn Was Better,"and even an '80s style love song called "Lover Undercover." Classically trained composer Gene Back mixes the high brow with the low brow by turning "We'll Be Bitter if You Litter in the Shitter" into a fugue, and remixes Mozart's Requiem throughout the EDM ballad "Welcome Home."

In "A Burning Mixtape," there's something for everyone from the unpredictable love triangle between Joe, Bill the Billionaire, and his secretary Catherine to hippies ranting about opiate induced constipation. Like The Book of Mormon, Burning Man: The Musical sets its sights on a topic so ripe for satire, and delivers a funny, yet meaningful storyline around the age­old American quest of self­discovery and reinvention.