Roach, Steve

A longstanding leader in contemporary electronic music, composer and multi-instrumentalist Steve Roach drew on the beauty and power of the Earth's landscapes to create lush, meditative soundscapes influential on the emergence of ambient and trance. A onetime professional motorbike racer born in California in 1955, Roach -- inspired by the music of Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Vangelis -- taught himself to play synthesizer at the age of 20; debuting in 1982 with the album Now, his early work was quite reminiscent of his inspirations, but with 1984's Structures from Silence his music began taking enormous strides, the album's expansive and mysterious atmosphere inspired directly by the natural beauty of the southwestern U.S. Subsequent works including 1986's three-volume Quiet Music series honed Roach's approach, his dense, swirling textures and hypnotic rhythms akin to environmental sound sculptures.

In 1988, inspired by the Peter Weir film The Last Wave, Roach journeyed to the Australian outback, with field recordings of aboriginal life inspiring his acknowledged masterpiece, the double-album Dreamtime Return. A year later, he teamed with percussionist Michael Shrieve and guitarist David Torn for The Leaving Time, an experiment in ambient jazz. After relocating to the desert outskirts of Tucson, AZ, Roach established his own recording studio, Timeroom, and in the years to follow grew increasingly prolific, creating both as a solo artist and in tandem with acts including Robert Rich, Michael Stearns, Jorge Reyes, and Kevin Braheny -- in all, close to two dozen major works in the 1990s alone, all of them located at different points on the space-time continuum separating modern technology and primitive music.

His album roster from that decade includes Strata (1991), Artifacts (1994), Well of Souls (1995), Amplexus (1997), and Dust to Dust (1998). Early Man was released on Projekt in early 2001, followed by one of his many collaborations with Vidna Obmana, Innerzone. Throughout the remainder of the early 2000s, Roach remained extremely prolific, with his release schedule including the Projekt titles Trance Spirits (with Jeffrey Fayman), the quadruple-disc Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces, Spirit Dome and Somewhere Else (with Obmana), Fever Dreams, Mantram, and Nada Terma (with Byron Metcalf and Mark Seelig), the three-part Immersion series, Arc of Passion, and Stream of Thought (with Erik Wøllo). He also self-released several titles on his own through Timeroom Editions.

2000 - Midnight Moon

Roach, Steve - 2000 - Midnight Moon

While Midnight Moon may not be Steve Roach's first recorded encounter with a guitar, it is his first recording playing the guitar. The seven moody soundscapes that make up Midnight Moon are actually interrelated pieces based on Roach's experimentation with that instrument, a fretless bass, and the E-bow. Unlike Roach's other single-work concept pieces, such as Dreamcircle, The Magnificent Void, and others, the notion of movement on Midnight Moon is different: It doesn't move toward or away from anything or come back to the place it began. Its seven pieces are reflections, under the particular moons of midnight, from full perception of its glow to total darkness. The guitar in this instance is of particular use given its ability to present stark contrast and large empty spaces. From the nine-minute "Ancestor's Circle," where the trace of a physical space is all that remains in the memory of the perceiver, and what it tries to conjure of that place of observance, to "Midnight Loom," which is 21 minutes in the presence of that which is truly luminous, shimmering in its stark yet majestic beauty. A language is evoked between the three instruments of an image and its shadows, traces and fleeting sleights of mind. You can never be sure of what it is you are hearing or seeing -- particularly if you listen in the dark! It's a gorgeous work that seems to dissolve as suddenly as it appeared, into Aether. "Deadwood" and "Broken Town" are not merely haunting pieces, they are haunted. They present the more ominous and lonely aspects of nocturnal presence and spectral visitation. This is the "dark night of the soul" so to speak. In "Hope" there is an emergence, of sorts. It is tentative, a glistening in the darkness, shard of light under the shade of night. It is as if there was something breathing, emanating under the dome of heaven, some visitation by a heavenly presence bringing comfort after the previous trial. And finally, in "Later Phase" and "Moon and Star," Roach has not so much come full circle as shown the phases and faces of the orb that controls the tides and offers solace to some and terror to others. As in "Ancestor's Circle," a hazy, gauzy history is invoked, called from special terrains that have long since passed from the earth though they inhabit our psyches, whisper to our emotions, and cause us to look inward to see where it is we come from. "Moon and Star" brings with its sonic architecture the full manifestation of those presences, not hunted but certainly haunted, brazenly shining in darkness and in light, threatening to no one and instructive for all who would look -- and listen. This is a marvelous next step into Steve Roach's ever widening cavern of inner sound worlds.

		1		Ancestor's Circle	Roach	8:45
		2		Midnight Loom	Roach	22:03
		3		Deadwood	Roach	7:33
		4		Broken Town	Roach	10:37
		5		Hope	Roach	5:00
		6		Later Phase	Roach	11:45
		7		Moon and Star	Roach	7:26

¡Aquí!