Roach, Steve

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2016
LTD 300
Hot on the heels of the ALIVE IN THE VORTEX release comes LIVE IN TUCSON: PINNACLE MOMENTS. This can be considered a bookend experience to the recent Vortex album; it was created and recorded February 14th, 2015, 16 months after the L.A. Vortex concert at Tucson's Solar Culture Galactic Center.
After many requests for a CD version from concert attendees and those who viewed the YouTube clips, Steve considered how and when to release this music. It's happening now.
This release presents the highest and deepest extractions from the concert: five nearly all-new pieces captured on a studio-quality live recording within an intimate performance environment. The flow of energy this music holds offers an empowering way to ride an emotional soundwave into the present moment. Starting with the DESERT SOLITAIRE soaked atmosphere of the opening piece to the emotion-infused live SKELETON KEYS passage on track 4, this music is an essential expression of Steve Roach's soundcurrent passion.
The 300-copy limited edition CD will be the only time this music is released on CD. Last year's Invisible, also a 300-copy limited edition, sold out quickly. Don't miss out on this edition

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2013
Created in a single two-hour session two days after his epic May 2013 Ambicon concert, LIVE TRANSMISSION is Steve Roach doing what he does best: creating transcendent electronic music emerging from an elemental, instinctual mode. With months of preparation absorbed into his system, Steve's slow-flow moods and evocative soundscapes blend with ecstatic rhythmic sections born from hands-on analog sound creation. The result is a direct transference of creative energy from the artist through his instruments out to the listener.

For this release, Steve traveled with a portable version of his Timeroom Studio to the San Francisco-based headquarters of internet radio station SomaFM. For the past twelve years, SomaFM's "Drone Zone" channel has exposed a global audience to the best of electronic excursions with Steve as one of their regularly featured artists. Over the past few years, Soma founder Rusty Hodges and Steve have discussed creating a first-time-ever live electronic transmission directly from the SomaFM home base. As an in-the-studio immersion experience, this event unfolded with a large worldwide audience tuning in; Steve channeled that awareness into this expanded excursion. The set weaves all-new soundworlds with evolving themes from classic pieces into a seamless odyssey.

On LIVE TRANSMISSION the musical journey is experienced in its pure form of creation: potent sounds unfolding in front of the listener like an act of nature. Surging heartbeats blend with deep atmospheric cloudbursts and serene moments of repose soon dissolve into shapeshifting landscapes. LIVE TRANSMISSION is the place where Steve’s music thrives, created at the leading edge of now.

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2017
LONG THOUGHTS is ambient music master Steve Roach's first long-form electronic release on Projekt since 2012. In an era where a constant deluge of overstimulation from all directions challenges and fractalizes our attention span into smaller and smaller packets, this 73-minute sanctuary provides solace; a soul-renewing immersion in the deeper end of the self-reflection pool. Roach first imagined the foundation of this release in early 2016, and over the last fifteen months he lived and slept listening to evolving versions of the album. This extended timeframe with LONG THOUGHTS supported a subtle, developing sense of the energy within the piece. A consummate evolution is important to Steve's fully-immersed micro-to-macro-soundsculpting approach. When experienced in looped infinite playback mode, the album creates a sense of constant, sustained nourishment to realign, reset, and soften the edges of modern life's quantized thought process. LONG THOUGHTS is part of a larger body of acclaimed long-form pieces from Roach's vast catalog. "To the Threshold Of Silence" (from WORLD'S EDGE), THE DREAM CIRCLE, SLOW HEAT, BLOODMOON RISING and the six hours of the Immersion series are all part of the sonic DNA contained in LONG THOUGHTS. Roach's pioneering approach to the soundscape-drone-ambient artform draws from a rich harmonic tapestry of chordal interweaves and original sound design. Moving beyond the static form of drone music, Roach's work in this area breathes and sighs with an organic wave that exists in its own dimension yet feels intimately familiar.  The music presents the listener with many ways to create their own Long Thought zone: gazing into the summer night sky, endless loop mode in the home at a low volume, direct engagement at a louder volume, used as a sleep environment, or for "holding of the space" as a kind of aural incense burning gently through the day and night.
As Roach enters his fourth decade as an artist of visionary soundworlds, his dedication to this artform presents a vital sanctuary of deep resonance and reflection.

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 1996 
The Magnificent Void forms a bridge between his recent explorations of tribal/techno rhythms and instrumentation to a space music that is original and engrossing. For example, digeridoo is played on the album, but is played in such a way that it does not sound like any instrument with which I am familiar. The music creates a landscape that lacks a geographic reference, a place which is mysterious and unknown yet strangely familiar.
The Magnificent Void is that place of emptiness which we approach with fascination and fear. The music transports us to a void where destruction and creation are simultaneous, where the cosmos collapse, where death will eventually take us all. Many of the tracks are spacious and wash over the listener like waves on a forever twilight shore.
Others, such as "Cloud of Unknowing" and "The Magnificent Void" convey the grandeur and chaos of cosmic creation.
This is a wonderful release, and should make new fans for this talented artist.

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2018  
Mercurius is a resplendent sonic expression on the psychology and spirituality of impermanence and finding comfort in the liminal spaces of the in-between. Moving beyond the security of naming the infinite nuances intrinsic to being human is just one of the threads of intention woven into this music. Composed in four movements, Mercurius is a soulful resonation upon the ineffable.  The ebb and flow within Mercurius emerges from its own space and time moving beyond ambient, immersive or drone-based pieces. Masterfully delivered, Roach's singular evolving language of contemplative soundworlds arrives at a place of deeper refinement. Through the stately, profound pacing of chordal harmonic structures the diaphanous suspension and release of the four movements breathe with exquisite grace and depth.

"This release could only have been created at this point in my life, after all that has come before, bringing me to this point in my music's evolution and to this place of which Mercurius speaks..." — Steve

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2000  
This is the first solo album by Steve Roach on the Projekt label. Another first is the fact that this album does not contain any synthesizer keyboard sounds. The entire album is realized through the use of the Stratocaster guitar, the Ebow and various processing effects. Like so much of Steves music, atmosphere plays the biggest part in the sound that becomes a Steve Roach album. MIDNIGHT MOON explores on the whole a rather dark terrain, but containing all the right elements to absorb the listener in a cocoon of ritual intensity, deep probing music to explore thesmall hours with.
Steves introduction to the guitar and the playing of it was through curiosity. The results being fresh but still containing that certain Roach sound which has been so powerful and popular over the years.

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2018
MOLECULES OF MOTION is a sonic marvel: shimmering, pulsing, moving, emotional and engaging. A tapestry of sequencer-spun patterns floats upon an atmosphere of lush emotive textures alive with a vibrant, life-affirming glow. These four pieces can best be described as meditations upon elegant motion and electro-sensual space. On his first studio album since his recent Grammy nomination, Roach calls upon an expansive 35-year legacy at the forefront of electronic music creation. MOLECULES OF MOTION is a masterful album with roots in the Berlin School and a foot in the transcendent unknown of the future flowing into now. Roach's sonic universe merges into a realm that induces a weightless, three-dimensional sensation: a feeling of floating while simultaneously energized and informed from a serene calm center. His music itself has long transcended the tools with which it is made, while his choice of hardware-only, and mostly analog, instruments is fundamental to the signature sound of MOLECULES OF MOTION. It is proof positive of the artist bringing the high and deep together in this touchstone release.  As his creative approach evolves, the categories of classification dissolve. The rich palette of synth textures and intricate layers of lattice-work embraces the senses activating a heightened awareness while evoking an emotional resonance and reverie, a quality unique within all of Roach's soundworlds.

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2003
Floating, oceanesque chords, minimal harmonies and huge spaces - no beats, no rhythms. Listening to this album is rather like being immersed in swelling, curling ambient fluid. Each track a different drifting tonal infusion. There are wispy, glistening synthesised textures and vast meandering, droning fogs all rich in detail yet blurring, indistinct. The heavily layered sheets of sound form into eddies, that languorously shift, dissolve and are replaced.
The mood here is very dependent upon the listener. Each individual is freely able to associate this constantly shifting, ambiguous weaving of tones with their own mental imagery. I tend to visualize a thick tangible darkness shot through with viscous furling colour. At times the darkness amasses substance and can suggest despair, loss or isolation - or instead the listener is immersed in a sonic mist of indescribable beauty, as safe and as warm as the womb.
The cover art is spread across a beautiful digipak. Ambient color glows on the front in a vibrant ammonite spiral, almost as you might see it from within, this then disperses into vague forms and lush densities across the additional panels. The cds themselves are printed with exquisitely subtle liquid textures. The whole package has a sumptuous beauty that makes it immediately desirable even before you've heard the contents.
Tranquil, placid minimal harmonies that float and swirl, thickening and dispersing with a sense of no beginning and no end. The dreamlike torpidity can occasionally suggest ghostly, floating gloom, sometimes flushed, churning color, or even infinity wrapped up in sound. Here is music to influence your environment and state of mind or, if you prefer, to be influenced by your current dreams and disposition - a canvas upon which to daub your own mental imagery.
This music could well accompany lying and staring up into open space, meditating or simply drifting in the expanses of your own mind. A focus for a unique musical experience, incredibly deep and absorbing. A backdrop for reading or thinking, creating a mood or even study.
For the ambient explorer looking for pure sound uncluttered by rhythm, tempo or melody.
Here the first two CDs of the 4 CD Set.

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2003
Floating, oceanesque chords, minimal harmonies and huge spaces - no beats, no rhythms. Listening to this album is rather like being immersed in swelling, curling ambient fluid. Each track a different drifting tonal infusion. There are wispy, glistening synthesised textures and vast meandering, droning fogs all rich in detail yet blurring, indistinct. The heavily layered sheets of sound form into eddies, that languorously shift, dissolve and are replaced.
The mood here is very dependent upon the listener. Each individual is freely able to associate this constantly shifting, ambiguous weaving of tones with their own mental imagery. I tend to visualize a thick tangible darkness shot through with viscous furling colour. At times the darkness amasses substance and can suggest despair, loss or isolation - or instead the listener is immersed in a sonic mist of indescribable beauty, as safe and as warm as the womb.
The cover art is spread across a beautiful digipak. Ambient color glows on the front in a vibrant ammonite spiral, almost as you might see it from within, this then disperses into vague forms and lush densities across the additional panels. The cds themselves are printed with exquisitely subtle liquid textures. The whole package has a sumptuous beauty that makes it immediately desirable even before you've heard the contents.
Tranquil, placid minimal harmonies that float and swirl, thickening and dispersing with a sense of no beginning and no end. The dreamlike torpidity can occasionally suggest ghostly, floating gloom, sometimes flushed, churning color, or even infinity wrapped up in sound. Here is music to influence your environment and state of mind or, if you prefer, to be influenced by your current dreams and disposition - a canvas upon which to daub your own mental imagery.
This music could well accompany lying and staring up into open space, meditating or simply drifting in the expanses of your own mind. A focus for a unique musical experience, incredibly deep and absorbing. A backdrop for reading or thinking, creating a mood or even study.
For the ambient explorer looking for pure sound uncluttered by rhythm, tempo or melody.
Here the last two CDs of the 4 CD Set.

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2017
A deep ambient flow of six interconnected soundworld immersions evoking an echo in time, emanating in all directions. The presence of life’s nostalgic imprints casts this sense forward into a future state of longing and etheric reveries just out of reach but coming into form.
The mysterious - visceral power of sound works on many levels as a sensory activating experience. This is one of the many components that makes the music Steve Roach creates so nourishing, and alive. Through a deeper listening into the interweaves of emotion, place and time we can find solace, and an expanded sense of being. This is the realm where Nostalgia for the Future strives to dwell. Created between January and July 2017 this project was born from the solitude and focus from within The Timeroom studio in Baja Arizona. The result is this alluring time echo, a Nostalgia for the Future fully realized for the here and now. Nostalgic reference points : Mystic Chords and Sacred Spaces, The Magnificent Void, Dynamic Stillness