Roach, Steve

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2009    
After months of distillation, IMMERSION: FOUR has been released from its vessel in a slow and steady flow, as if streaming forth from an infinite sound fountain. IMMERSION: FOUR embraces the senses with the warmth and micro subtle perceptual shifts that has defined the Immersion series. No beginning, no end, designed for infinite playback mode, IMMERSION: FOUR is a steady state zone created specifically as a tone meditation, enhancing the living space as sonic incense. Gently immersive and especially effective at low volume, the non-dynamic nature of this space supports focused day and night activities. The Immersion series is perfect for creative states, sleeping, reading, long hours at the computer and other functions where traditional music could be considered invasive.

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2006
Immersion : one is the first of an ongoing series of long form, steady state "zones" created specifically as tone meditations for the living space. The effective low volume, non-dynamic nature of the series can support sleeping as well as creative states and other functions where "music" is considered invasive. Purposely untitled, minimal in nature and sonically uninterrupted for 74 minutes, this music brings steve's years as a sound painter of deep subtlety to a point where the "brush" has only a few bristles and nothing more is needed.
Minimal long-form zonal ambience. There is no melody of any sort here, no beat, no progression, no percussion - simply uninterrupted scintillating sound. A lustrous sonic sheet, a warm current in an ocean of music, a slowly revolving stream of light. Just as the sky doesn't need to be dramatically animated to be beautiful - Immersion:One is delightful in it's simple individuality. A gently whistling tone repeatedly catches the attention as it rises and falls, as if played by the wind. Smoother layers flow around this fluctuating thread, slowly, comfortably, imperceptibly morphing. I'm reluctant to pull this woven thread too far apart in order to examine it - the appeal of Immersion:One lies in its twisting undisturbed whole.
Restful and completely immerse. There is a deeply fluid momentum here that suggests floatation on a drifting river of tone. The artwork aptly pictures this impression - showing an effervescent stream of green light, luminous against a black background. This visual accompaniment strongly affects one's mental imagery - a flow, a cord of music - however, this 'steady state' sound zone eventually absorbs the attentive listener, leaving one afloat on an endless expanse of oceanic drift.
A beautiful digipak carries this CD - deepest glossy black shot through with a jet of light. Multilayered, aglow and bearing multitudinous motes of brightness - this emerald band runs centrally across every panel. Text is minimal - only titles and brief credits - nothing superfluous - focus on the stream. On the reverse, the stream is magnified, each detail sparkling before the eye, carried along on currents unseen. A very pleasing package - a nice object to own.
IMMERSION: ONE is one of Steve Roach's most intentionally minimal recordings, as promotional material explains this album is "Gently immerse and especially effective at low volume, the non-dynamic nature of this space can support sleeping as well as creative states, reading and other functions where "music" is considered invasive." Truly beautiful and potentially absorbing - the sound subtly attracts the ear, recedes into the background, resurfaces and holds the attention once more - all with effortless fluidity.
If you want something to see how far ambient music can go and still be elegant, something to reduce harmony to its most basic elements - this is the album for you.

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2007
222 minute 3-CD set of all-new material.
Focusing on ambient "zones" created as tone meditations for the living space, immersion: three is destined to create a new benchmark in the long-form ambient genre. With one composition per disc, the nearly 4 hours of all-new material on immersion: three display Steve's quiet mastery of the immersive ambient genre.
Gently effective at low volume, the non-dynamic nature of these spaces supports focused day and night activities. Minimal in nature and sonically uninterrupted for 74 minutes per disc, these pieces bring Steve's years as a sound painter of deep subtle spaces to a rarified point in time.
immersion: three is perfect for creative states, sleeping, reading, long hours at the computer and other functions where traditional music could be considered invasive. This release is especially effective in dissolving the sense of linear time.
"Steve Roach continues to make a rarefied sound as the Mark Rothko of electronic music."

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2006
Immersion : two is the second of an ongoing series of long form, steady state "zones" created specifically as tone meditations for the living space. The effective low volume, non-dynamic nature of the series can support sleeping as well as creative states and other functions where "music" is considered invasive. Purposely untitled, minimal in nature and sonically uninterrupted for 74 minutes, this music brings steve's years as a sound painter of deep subtlety to a point where the "brush" has only a few bristles and nothing more is needed.
This release offers a solid dose of ambience in its purest form. Tonalities unfurl with unflinching lassitude, unmarked by discernible variance. An atmosphere of constancy is achieved, moody and soothing, yet actually slowly mutating as it slides along a harmonic beam. Auxiliary textures surface with immense subtlety, merging with each other to form thicker resonance.
Soft, almost hesitant noises appear, sparks illuminating the sparse environment with tender gurgling and synthetic rattling. The soundscape is breathing, but the cycles of contraction and expansion are so distended as to become inconspicuous changes in the even flow of ethereal substance. As the piece continues, however, these pulsations become more apparent as the music flexes with luxuriant demeanor. Darker elements begin to show up, as if the sighing soundscape has entered a region of higher density that produces deeper echoes of the somber oscillation. Obviously, this recording is intended to provide the listener with a calming backdrop that promises to be un intrusive yet subtly engaging, affecting the subconscious by gently stroking the periphery of concentration.

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2021
INTO THE MAJESTIC starts 2021 on high note of radiant optimism while traversing a consequential moment in time. Relentless in connecting to a stillpoint within, the title track "Into the Majestic" was premiered and filmed as it unfolded during Steve's October 24th 2020 Timeroom concert livestream. The shimmering multidimensional inner weavings are at once delicate and expansive, showing the way forward with grace and resoluteness.

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2015 / 2019
INVISIBLE is a new long-form zone world Steve created while hunkering down in the Timeroom during the last few cold and rain-filled days of 2014. INVISIBLE is an ultra deep primordial dreamscape of shifting mercurial zones. Mist-shrouded amorphous phantasms appear and recede as distant substrata murmurs are felt as much as heard. Just a few days after its creation, it was offered as a gift on New Year's Eve and many were able to travel deeply into the new year in a collective global soundcurrent experience.

The response to the piece was quite enthusiastic, to the point where a limited-edition CD edition was created in early February. This quickly sold out, and now this extended 70-minute CD mix edition is the current and final version

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2011
Journey of One is a pinnacle live performance captured during the zenith of Steve Roach's rich tribal-ambient origins of the mid-1990's. The music rises from the darkness, an ancient voice chants in serpentine ecstasy only to subside and hover next to silence, soon broken by raging hybrid trance grooves, didgeridoo and mind-altering soundscapes that mesh to form a soundtrack for a future-primal culture. Journey of One is an ascent into the mystical and primordial places Roach first developed on Dreamtime Return, Artifacts, Origins, World's Edge and his Suspended Memories collaborations. This 2-CD set unfolds like the genesis of this influential sound. Roach meticulously, passionately utilizes the electro-acoustic nature that is the heart of this sound: earthy ferocity and multi-timbral frequencies drawn out to their fullest. This music shapeshifts between moods, always rushing forward engaging a range of electronic and acoustic tools: analog and digital synths, clay water pots percussion, butterfly cocoons and seed pod shakers, & ocarinas. The didgeridoos's hoary human-vocal sonic quality and a tumbling avalanche of hand-struck percussion further illustrate the tribalistic canvas.  "Roach conjures up stirring, metaphysical sounds and deeply inventive events from his electro-acoustic arsenal. It's an exploration of worlds simultaneously ancient, mystic and subconscious: the fourth, fifth, and infinite worlds beyond. These must surely have been the sounds ancient cultures rehearsed while the continental plates shifted below them." -Muze (about Steve's mid-90's releases)The world of Journey of One is immersed in striking, expansive landscapes and deeply entrenched rhythms permeated throughout by a darker, impending resonance, an exhibition of emerging primordial life teeming below an underbelly of gelatinous rhythms and tumultuous waves of electronics, up through the massive ambience and vast subterranean realms. All of these disparate elements are brought together on the ritual ground that is Journey of One. Roach has performed and recorded hundreds of live concerts worldwide over the years. The performance preserved as Journey of One proves to be an essential timeless moment. Held in an intimate setting in Sacramento, California in 1996, yet sounding like it was recorded today, this concert is presented exactly as it arose, without edits or treatments in the studio. "All of my music is audiobiographical in many ways," Roach reflects. "It comes from life, from higher arcing desires and dreams joined by the events and moments found in the day-to-day experience of being alive. Through it all, Journey of One is a living record of my time on the creative path that started many years ago. These releases are sign posts at points along the way, the journey of one man rapt in sound." This release is a stunning testament to the amazing live experience that Roach has developed over the years and a first-hand look at one of the original proponents of the tribal-ambient sound in action.

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2006
Kairos: The Meeting of Time and Destiny
A Visual Music Odyssey
KAIROS is a dynamic flow of visual wonder worlds created by five master light, film, and digital artists in collaboration with Steve. Drawing from a spectrum of visual techniques -- luminous organic analog light forms, dramatic Earth cinematography, cell-like computer animation -- micro and macro worlds join in a mind-expanding symbiotic flow between sound and visuals. Creation of the visuals evolved alongside the music over several years.
The music, shaped to the images, was created in the studio with the dynamic understanding that comes from taking it "out there" on the edge in the live setting. Much of the soundtrack was created directly for KAIROS, along with a merging of elements drawn from Steve's recent and future releases.
The culmination is an essential representation of the mythic import found in Steve's music and the visual core it stimulates. It is, both musically and visually, a pinnacle moment of shapeshifting sound and visionary-inducing works. Anyone who witnessed Steve's concerts this millennium will know what's in store. Featuring visuals from Lynn Augstein, Steve Lazur, Steven Rooke, John Vega, and John Wadsworth, with hybrid visual creation and final editing by Roger King.

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2008    
This is a surreal shape shifting grand adventure in sound, morphing through a constantly altering perspective giving witness to the creation of iconic landscape formations, stone monuments and massive alluvial desert plains, and the occasional pyroclastic flow.
This is the 20th release on Steve Roach's Timeroom Editions, which marks its 10th anniversary this year. LANDMASS was selected especially for this occasion, and is presented in a beautiful six-panel Digipak.
This release from 2008 offers 68 minutes of electronic music recorded live in the studios of WXPN for simultaneous broadcast on the Star's End program on May 20, 2007.
Here, Roach's signature ambience is presented with more substance. The tonalities expand to a healthy scale, moving beyond a mimicry of windblown air currents. Additional electronics coax the harmonics into a melodic definition, while more strident tones approximate a relaxed sense of rhythms throughout the performance with their twinkling pulsations.
Versatile sound souring bestows the music with novel edges. Are those bells hiding in the wandering effects? Do the ends of several sounds rise with a truncated vitality, lending the notes a hint of buoyancy? In one passage, the presence of tastefully plodding beats injects a soothing animation to the slowly churning vaporous music. This lively disposition becomes mirrored by the electronics as textures swell and fade with pronounced enthusiasm and those twinkling pulsations exhibit a stately jubilation.
At another point, sprightly tempos occur, driving the melodies into a pacific fervor that is tempered by the airborne harmonics. While the gist of the compositions is luxurious and peaceful, a sense of escalating tension is generated as the flow carries the audience on a journey across landscapes of ancient majesty, ultimately lifting everyone on an ascension to stratospheric altitudes where the grandeur is obvious despite its subtlety.
While mainly ambient, this music is seasoned with enough instances of electronic enervation to make it satisfying to those who prefer their soundscapes to deliver something more than ethereal essence.

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2011  
Steve's pinnacle performance from 2010's SoundQuest Fest proved to be a real moment in time, and fortunately it was documented with a prestine recording that places the listener front and center. It will be released as a single CD presenting the first 74 minutes of the concert as it unfolded. Three distinct realms are seamlessly mapped out in this inspired set. The opening starts with a 25-minute piece of perpetual forward motion in the mode of Destination Beyond, created specially for the concert, carved from pure analog synths and sequencers. From here we experience an amazing interplay between didgeridoo players Dashmesh Khalsa, Brian Parnharn, percussionist Byron Metcalf and Steve performing real-time looping, processing and mixing along with soundworlds, ocarina and voice. This passage is an all-out expression of shamanic ecstasy that boils over into the engulfing tribal trance state of "Thunder Walk" from the recent release Dream Tracker. The last portion of the set settles into an ultra drifting electro-organic zone. This evocative space, which premiered at the Fest, would soon evolve into the opening of Circadian Rhythms.