Roach, Steve

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

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 1992
This CD brings together selections from Steve Roach's first two recordings, Now and Traveler. The fourteen selections featured in this collection were composed between 1979 and 1983. Although they hail from the days before samplers and MIDI advancements, many of these pieces sound as if they were created in the digital age. Roach's early releases, however, were created entirely through an inventive combination of analog synthesizers and imaginative recording techniques. More than two decades later, this music is filled with a freshness and emotional urgency, indicating just how far ahead of his time the California-born composer really was. First released in 1982, Now is an entrancing journey through darkness and light, from the ancient past to the eternal present, a powerful statement of birth, growth, transition, and rebirth into the living moment. With the release of Traveler, Roach continued his sound quest through a series of interlocking pieces that venture through evocative landscapes, both familiar and strange. Although Roach depicts a vast array of emotions and experiences in his music, the overall effect remains that of unresolved searching. Now and Traveler are the first two chapters in an ongoing story of musical and personal discovery that continues to unfold in his music today.

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 1997
On This Planet reflects Steve’s other, much more visceral and rhythmic sound explorations.
This is a collection of music recorded in live performances and Steve describes it as “carved from the live experience” and that he wanted to capture the intensity released in that situation.
The music starts with a thunderstorm before various voices and other noises slowly emerge. A poem is spoken, a bullroarer sends out its call and a strong rhythm kicks in. There is a lot of sound sources such as ocarinas, grinding stones, drums and rain sticks on the CD mixing with the rhythms to create a very tribal soundscape.
The title track, last on the CD, has Steve playing with guest musicians Patrick O’Hearn, Roger King and Omar Faruk Tekbilek and is a great slab of musical improvisation creating something more than the sum of its parts.
This is a great CD as it shows the various threads of Steve’s musical journey and is a hugely enjoyable listen.

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2024
Steve Roach’s new purely atmospheric statement hovers within a warm and embracing expression of etheric ambience. One Day of Forever pulls back the layers of memory, time and perception to express life’s amber-lit emotions, continuing an intimate, mystical-revealing vision within Roach’s work.
In this one day of forever the meditation on longing, nostalgia, connection, loss, grace and gratitude transmutes from fleeting moments into gentle epiphanies. This album furthers the refined intention within the elemental approach first expressed on his previous 2CD, Reflections in Repose.
The pieces began with a minimal collection of instruments leading to emotive sonic choices which paint the impressionistic realm contained in each of the album’s five long-form pieces. The core of the release is built around the beguiling sound of the Mellotron (originally an English electro-mechanical musical instrument developed in 1963, but here performed on a new Swedish digital version) and emotional warmth of the Oberheim OB-X8.
At the center of the album is “One Day,” a moving collaboration between Steve and electric violist Linda Kohanov resulting in a hybrid of classical and ambient undercurrents. On the closing piece additional acoustic sources add to the emotional palette of the Mellotron and Oberheim with the warm breathing timbers of Serena Gabriel’s harmonium and the woven alluring strands of Linda Kohanov’s electric viola. The alchemy of these organic sonorities brings another new and vital aspect to Steve’s evolving ambient work.
Steve reflects, “This music reaches towards the moments between moments, leading to the eternal now. Each day provides the opportunity to connect to a sense and knowing of forever in our own individual ways; it lives within my ears, eyes, heart and soul, nourished by the ineffable and my desire is to embrace each day… into forever.”

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 1993    
Steve's next solo after extensive touring in Europe and fruitful collaborations with Robert Rich and Suspended Memories. Primordial shamanic electronic music at its most powerful. Steve's didgeridoo playing is woven throughout. Jorge Reyes appears as guest, and the hybrid trance grooves find a new level of potency infused by surreal soundworlds dripping with primordial sweat. Incredible liner note story by Linda Kohanov helps to set the mood. Perfect music to shake the primordial cage door loose and run outside.  Origins may be the pinnacle of an ascent into the mystic and primordial places Roach began to visit on Dreamtime Return, the Suspended Memories project and World's Edge. The circulating didgeridoo patterns that fully imbibe this record are not only its' tonal center, but the electro-acoustic nature that is the heart of its sound, and Roach meticulously, passionately utilizes its earthy ferocity and multi-timbale frequencies to its fullest. "Clay, Wood, Bone, Dirt" uses the didj's hoary sonic pyrotechnics and a tumbling avalanche of hand-struck percussion to illustrate its tribalistic canvas. This is a recording that immerses the participant in daunting, expansive landscapes and deeply entrenched cultures permeated throughout by a darker, ominous resonance, as mortified by the unsettling melodrama and formidable rhythms of "The Face in the Fire". Never before has Roach's electronic surface felt so earthen and weathered; all of the assertive ambience and environmental dissonance he's pressurized up to now reaches critical mass in Origins' molten core.
Recorded and mixed at The Timeroom, Tuscon Arizona.
Composed, performed and produced by Steve Roach.
Guest artists: Suso Saiz, Jorge Reyes, Linda Kohanov and Daniel Nagle.

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2016
In this new atmospheric opus, pioneering composer and artist of the transcendent Steve Roach explores the confluence of texture, tonality, sonic abstraction, continuity and space with a set of six interconnected paintings in motion. The spirituality of sound is central within these emotional landscapes with infinite horizons. In the way a visual artist mixes their colors and utilizes the natural light-infused ambience of the studio to support the piece as it evolves, Roach initiated these mystical sonic states under the influence of the late hours at night. Within the shroud of natural darkness and a few low level lights in the studio supporting the creative flow, these paintings in the dark were born. Steve often finds parallels in his creative process to that of a painter or sculptor, and aspired in this direction before discovering electronic music as his main form of artist expression. PAINTING IN THE DARK presents an aesthetic that is unique to Roach's work, embracing the mystery and wonder of sound as a constant evolving companion to the ongoing bloom of consciousness.

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2025
LTD 500
Portals & Spirals focuses on sequencer based rhythms and melodic beds both new and familiar in the Roach universe. All of the usual analog, digital modular and percussive friends are here.
Created & Mixed in the moment in 2025, this release is propelled by its dramatic movement, urgent energy and melodic resonance. Time is elastic yet all is now. Enjoy the ride.

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2005
POSSIBLE PLANET was created completely on a modular analog system which I assembled over a five-month period. As the sonic life form was evolving, the system that was creating it was evolving as well, in order for the changes to occur. This was also a great metaphor for the themes of the emerging cellular life forms I was dreaming into.
"In order to remove the reliable and familiar modes of working, I eliminated a few basics: no MIDI, keyboards of any kind, or computers for composition and editing. It was all about twisting knobs, feeling it in my fingertips and coaxing the current into the desired direction. POSSIBLE PLANET was recorded during three live sessions. Each session would start after several days of creating and learning the nuances of a 'living' patch I had created, from which the soundforms were drawn."
In 2005, Roach finished and released one of his most unusual albums to date, the eerie POSSIBLE PLANET. Here he switches instrumentation from his usual ultra-smooth synthesizers, percussion, and slow-played electric guitar to a set of neo-retro “analog” synthesizers. These were designed to retrieve that “old-fashioned” pop sound of the ‘70s and ‘80s but in the hands of Roach, they put forth long, weird trance worlds of drone-ambient.
He punctuates these long drone pieces with electronic versions of rattles, shells, and insect noises. These sound truly alien, as if someone had put a tiny microphone in an anthill to listen to them talking to each other. The third drone-piece is full of insectoid buzzing, which has a shimmer of recognizable chords to it, though it is no less spooky than the earlier non-tonal passages. You get the feeling that the “possible planet” that Roach is evoking is not Earth.

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2000
It was inevitable that synthesist Steve Roach would apply his soundscape designs to the deep, ancient, and often harrowing chants of Tibetan Buddhist monks. He's gone into the primal core with Aboriginal sounds and cultures on albums such as Dreamtime Return, and his Magnificent Void CD stepped into the abyss. On Prayers to the Protector, he works with the chants of Thupten Pema Lama of the Dip Tse Chok Ling Monastery. In Roach's studio, Thupten Pema Lama sang these devotional prayers and entreaties unaccompanied. Then Roach slipped them into his own soundworld, surrounding the monk with evanescent waves of synthesized ambiences. Being Steve Roach, this isn't the usual pretty New Age synth-glissandos, but darkly hued textures with metallic edges. On "Djewa takgya lingchee lhunbur dje" (a prayer for the world, according to the liner notes), he evokes the metal gongs and bowls of Tibetan chants as well as a freight train putting on the brakes in space. Prayers to the Protector doesn't dress up Buddhist chants, it just sends them into deeper space.

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2006    
"Shimmering", "life-affirming" and "moving only forward" best describes this new release drawn from the pulsing side of the lifeblood found in Steve's work. The next step after LIFE SEQUENCE, with a contained energy and spontaneously pulsing creative peaks, this one lights up the brain and excites the ears in a way that only pure analog sound can offer.
PROOF POSITIVE was created over the past year, from '05 to '06. These all-new pieces, sequential with textural undercurrents, have a kind floating sensation; the sum total is purely hypnotic with a contained and sustained energy that is consistent through the entire CD. This one lights up the brain and excites the ears in a way that only a hands-on spontaneous approach to the moment can offer. A touchstone release for Steve, this is a perfect set for long drives on the open road or for traveling the inner landscapes while cruising in your favorite listening chair.
Proof Positive indeed!
Recorded, mixed and mastered at the Timeroom - Apache Springs, Sonoita AZ USA
All music by Steve Roach created mostly on analog modular and real analog synths with lots of knobs.