Roach, Steve

Artist: Steve Roach & Metcalf & Seelig
P: 2003    
"WACHUMA'S WAVE" is sacred music in the truest sense. It is a portal of travel, a soul retrieval, a ritual of deep time dreaming. Veteran trance percussionist Byron Metcalf teams up with German-based musician and shamanic practitioner Mark Seelig to bring forth a multi-textural blend of Bonsuri flutes, sacred chants and overtone singing, simmering percussion and other hybrid grooves, augmented by rich offerings of deep drift ambient synthesizer and didgeridoo from special guest, soundscape maestro Steve Roach.
Fans of THE SERPENT'S LAIR will be thrilled by this innovative and heart-stirring alchemy.
This project was built around Byron's evolving style of acoustic and processed percussion pieces pulsing in the spirit of THE SERPENT'S LAIR with Steve Roach. The spiritually rich overtone voice and flute of Mark Seelig creates a unique stirring blend that is organinc at the core. Although Steve was consumed with the creation of MYSTIC CHORDS & SACRED SPACES, he joined in on the project later on, adding soundworlds and processing throughout. This release sets the stage for a second project in production now, a full collaboration between Byron, Mark and Steve that was mapped out during a recent week this summer at the Timeroom.
Produced, recorded and moxed by Byron Metcalf at The Lair, Prescott, AZ, USA
Steve Roach parts recorded at The Timeroom, Tucson, AZ, USA
Tracks 1-5 composed by Byron Metcalf and Mark Seelig
Track 6 composed by Mark Seelig and Steve Roach With Steve Roach.

Artist: Steve Roach + Miles Richard + Peter Grenader
P: 2019
Miles Richmond and Peter Grenader along with guest artist Steve Roach have released their debut project POV. This ambient work engages the listening experience through a multi-timbral sonic adventure drawn from gliss guitar inner-weavings and deeply nuanced modular synth worlds. The feeling throughout the flow presents a dynamic yet serene emotional terrain.
Elemental touchstones are early Fripp and Eno, American Minimalism and textural ambient.
Miles Richmond Electric Guitarist and Hollywood trained composer/arranger with a long tenure in music production. Previous released collaborations include Tugruvu, which integrated sampled NY street interviews and found sound with electronic forth world rhythmic/ambient elements in the spirit of Jon Hassell, and 8 albums with Komla Amoaku, founder and director of the National Theatre of Ghana in Accra, West Africa.
Peter Grenader has an enduring history in electronic music. Studying music composition at the CalArts under the influence of Morton Subotnick, his music has been presented extensively in three continents -  winning the Periòdic Experimental Music Festival in Barcelona and the Virginia Commonwealth Electronic Music Festival.  Past collaborations include Analoglive! (with film composer Gary Chang, Nine Inch Nails keyboardist Alessandro Cortini, Richard Devine, Chas Smith, Thighpaulsandra), The zZyzx Society (with Jill Fraser, Chas Smith, Thighpaulsandra and Danny Carey of Tool.  Past releases include Secret Life on Coda Recordings, The zZyzx Society on ZSR Records and Patch.CVTWO on Organic Records.
Guest Artist and Production support Steve Roach. 

Artist: Steve Roach & Robert Logan
P: 2016
BIOSONIC's labyrinth of bio-electrical rhythmic pieces mixes with passages of deep drifting textural magnetism. Nine tracks possessed with intense fire and driving dynamism push down to the molecular level, while entrancing groovescapes inhabit new textural worlds of mind-expanding power. The music's intention is ecstasy and intensity -- like the frenzied rush of red blood cells, nerve impulses or the firing of pistons -- such tendencies are balanced by an undercurrent of tranquility and yearning.
Roach and Logan describe: BIOSONIC expresses a kinetic energy that drives the imagination channeled through the tools of hypersonic creation. The expressions rise up from the unconsciousness; the bio/machine-theme mushrooms outwards in this sonic fantasy. It emerges from the pulses and rhythms of the body while also diving consciously into expressing fractalized patterns which find parallel in the natural world, the universe and beyond. This is a vivid dream world for the bio-mechanical era where the lines between human and machine dissolve and reach moments of peak perception."
The complete Story of BIOSONIC and SECOND NATURE.
Co-creation across an ocean of shifting sonic paradigms.
Pushing the boundaries of perception-expanding music, Steve Roach and Robert Logan release two vastly different transmissions of powerful emotion and exploration.
BIOSONIC's elegant futurism and SECOND NATURE's romantic minimalism are distinct yet linked through a passion for engaging, subtle body-mind states. The former's darkly ecstatic, deeply-layered, electro-neural atmosphere contrasts with the latter's nuanced, sparse, ambient-atmospherics and processed-piano tone paintings.
BIOSONIC's labyrinth of bio-electrical rhythmic pieces mixes with passages of deep drifting textural magnetism. Tracks possessed with intense fire and driving dynamism push down to the molecular level, while entrancing groovescapes inhabit new textural worlds of mind-expanding power. The music's intention is ecstasy and intensity -- like the frenzied rush of red blood cells, nerve impulses or the firing of pistons -- such tendencies are balanced by an undercurrent of tranquility and yearning. This yearning finds a full embrace in the companion release SECOND NATURE, a shadowplay of gentle reflection and repose. The tone and warmth of processed electric grand piano mixed with atmospheric synths and textures are the grounding point for an emotive reflective watercourse of harmony, melody, texture and space woven together with an innate human sense of tension and release. The journey that led to the creation of these albums is a story unto itself. Twenty-eight-year-old England-based Logan has been a fan of sixty-one-year-old American ambient innovator Roach's music since first discovering it at the age of thirteen. Logan's father introduced electronic music into Logan's life at a young age; soon thereafter, an Amazon search turned up Roach's The Magnificent Void, a life-changing listening experience for the evolving artist. Logan remembers, "I had been looking for nourishing, truly mysterious, deep-space music being carved out by current artists in modern studios; with Void, the album was everything I dreamed of and much more. As a teenager, I went on umpteen mind-bending, cosmic trips of the imagination to that album; I soon began collecting Steve's music. It soundtracked many blissful journeys in the night travels across Europe."
Logan's father was a teacher, and he encouraged his students to draw pictures in response to albums he played for them. In the mid-2000's he played Roach's music, then collected the drawings and sent them to Roach along with a CD of Logan's ambient music.
A correspondence grew between the two artists separated by more than thirty years of experience; the mutual appreciation was immediate. As Roach recalls, "I was instantly amazed upon hearing Robert's first CD. His music was already emoting at a very high level that seemed well beyond his years. We began a long-distance collaboration fusing and morphing our approaches and unique languages into a new hybrid of electronic music."
Over the course of four years, the two traded sound files with regular phone sessions and emails mapping out the vision and pieces that would become BIOSONIC. Logan and Roach describe the work, "BIOSONIC expresses a kinetic energy that drives the imagination channeled through the tools of hypersonic creation. The expressions rise up from the unconsciousness; the bio/machine-theme mushrooms outwards in this sonic fantasy. It emerges from the pulses and rhythms of the body while also diving consciously into expressing fractalized patterns which find parallel in the natural world, the universe and beyond. This is a vivid dream world for the bio-mechanical era where the lines between human and machine dissolve and reach moments of peak perception." In late 2015, Logan visited Roach's Timehouse studio in Arizona for an intensive to put the finishing touches on the album; the creative session-environment inspired an entirely new project. A second album was created unexpectedly.
Roach says, "SECOND NATURE emerged directly from instinct, the call and response to the moment between two artists interacting together in the studio for the first time. It's a 'less is more' minimalist statement. The balance of ambiguity and quiet reflection is present in this set of pieces of fleeting emotional weight. I utilized the Timehouse studio as an instrument, working with my beloved vintage analog synths, live looping, mixing and effects processing. This created the opening for Robert to focus solely on playing processed electric grand piano; it evoked a new way of performing, drawing on his years of experience with the instrument. Over three days, the music emerged without hesitation. The album title perfectly speaks to the feeling we had with this process; it flowed forth as if by SECOND NATURE."
BIOSONIC and SECOND NATURE are two powerful, distinct yet interconnected releases. While in dramatic contrast to each other, the potency of the music on these releases is a testament to the agility that exists between these two artists. It reveals their immediate response to a universe of emotion and stimulated mental states felt and expressed in this pure transmission. The music celebrates the energy of being fully alive, engaging the senses, opening to a vast and fascinating world of BIOSONICs: body, mind and heart sound art for today.

Artist: Steve Roach & Robert Logan
P: 2016
Impressionistic, romantic minimalism. A shadowplay of nuanced, sparse, ambient-atmospherics and processed-piano tone paintings, truly one for infinite playback mode.
In late 2015, Londoner Robert Logan visited Roach's Timehouse studio in Arizona for an intensive to put the finishing touches on the BIOSONIC album; This was the first meeting between the artist after over 5 years of corespondance and long distant collabration. Almost immediataly this music emerge during the nonstop marathon. This second album was created unexpectedly and expresses a creative agility between the artists in its dramatic contrast with BIOSONIC. Roach says, "SECOND NATURE emerged directly from instinct, the call and response to the moment between two artists interacting together in the studio for the first time. It's a 'less is more' minimalist statement. The balance of ambiguity and quiet reflection is present in this set of pieces of fleeting emotional weight. I utilized the Timehouse studio as an instrument, working with my beloved vintage analog synths, live looping, mixing and effects processing. This created the opening for Robert to focus solely on playing processed electric grand piano; it evoked a new way of performing, drawing on his years of experience with the instrument. Over three days, the music emerged without hesitation. The album title perfectly speaks to the feeling we had with this process; it flowed forth as if by SECOND NATURE."

Artist: Steve Roach & Robert Rich
P: 1992    
Like the wild mushrooms that fungus enthusiast Robert Rich turns into gourmet dishes, the pieces on Soma seem to emanate directly from the ground, without belonging to any species hitherto defined. New Age? Nah. Ambient? Not exactly. Fungoid tribal trance? Maybe. Rich, the drone provocateur who invented the "sleep concert" in the early '80s, and Roach, proto-ambient pioneer whose Dreamtime Return remains a classic of organic New Age, distill a potent nectar of heartbeat-paced percussion--including rain sticks, clay water pots, kalimbas, and sequenced drums--and reverberant flutes, didgeridoos, and canyon-sized synthesizers. More rhythmically active than either the Roach-Vidna Obmana duet Well of Souls or early Roach electronica like Traveller, Soma--named for the Vedic potion said to deliver the drinker to God--is a Southwest vision quest that suggests Terence McKenna's psilocybin-mushroom theories: a connection to the very soul of the earth through ethno-botanical ingestion. Bottoms up. While STRATA, the first collaboration between Steve Roach and Robert Rich, sought to peel away the substratum layers of the inner consciousness, SOMA attempts to reconcile those emotions with the outer world through a wondrous, gripping corpus of sound. Here, Roach and Rich perform a stunning series of lively, aural mosaics that are like musical puzzle boxes with hundreds of oddly colored pieces. It is as if they tore up the veneer of the desert itself and constructed these sounds out of the earth's very natural fiber. Like the best free jazz improvisers, Roach and Rich intuitively communicate their separate identities into one collective whole. Another brilliant collaboration from two higly prolific and accomplished artists.

Artist: Steve Roach & Robert Rich
P: 1990    
Aural archaeologists Rich and Steve Roach delve deep into the strata of the primordial mind in this acclaimed 1990 collaboration. They forge a symbiotic artistic alliance where their signature sonic motifs are generally abandoned for the sake of a collective sound. Implementing their combined arsenal of synths, samplers, flutes, drums, and steel guitar, the duo creates a variety of moods and atmospheres--serene ambiences ("The Grotto of Time Lost"), ritualistic, rhythmic invocations ("Fearless"), intense dark ambient spaces ("Magma"), and surreal, bubbling soundscapes ("Persistence of Memory [For Dali]"). As with their other works, the composers utilize a balanced blend of organic and electronic instrumentation in an exploration of the human psyche that is simultaneously primal and cerebral. This album was a critical and commercial success, remaining on the Billboard New Age charts for several months after its initial release.

Artist: Steve Roach & Roger King
P: 1998    
Conceptually the focus of this collaboration between Steve Roach and Roger King is a historic Western theme. To that effort, the duo incorporates many classic elements derived from the period of the American settling of the Wild West.
Tracks like 'Rattler' and 'Ghost Train' are obvious references to the poisonous bane on the cowboy who forgot to check his boot, or the stable travel route across the rugged plain country.
Other tracks such as 'Gone West' or 'First Sunrise' evoke moods based similar experiences by some of the early American pioneers.
'Dust to Dust' sure brings back memories, although in a radically different manner that you might expect.

Artist: Steve Roach & S.Kent & K.Newby
P: 1996    
Halcyon Days is an amazing amalgam of electronics, drones, and non-European instrumentation assembled seamlessly by Steve Roach and Trance Mission members Stephen Kent and Kenneth Newby. Roach's soundscapes provide a perfect texture for the overlay of music of indigenous peoples, as was demonstrated in his collaboration with Stearns and Sunsinger last year on Kiva. In Halcyon Days, Newby brings his knowledge of the instruments and musical traditions of Indonesia, Kent demonstrates his mastery of the digeridoo, and Roach provides the landscape in which the drama takes place. The music is pregnant with the mystery of existence, and conveys a sense of the earth as both mother and destroyer. Rather than the sense of solitude which pervades much of the solo work of Roach, Kent and Newby create a sense of community - of a small group of people living close to the land with both reverence and fear. "Halcyon Days", "First Day", and "Riding the Atlas" are especially primal and social, with heavy percussion and digeridoo.
"Slow Walk at Stone Wash" and "Calyx Revelation" crackle with the heat of the desert and impart the feeling of open spaces. Although the album is dedicated to the halcyon days of winter (when the album was actually recorded), days of peace, creativity, and prosperity, the music frames those days with allusions to the sinister and hostile world.

Artist: Steve Roach + Serena Gabriel
P: 2020
Inanna’s Dream is a multi-instrumental ambient sonic odyssey of pure emotion and enchantment. Through the six electroacoustic offerings, feelings of yearning, vulnerability and epiphany are infused into a heart and soul stirring expression that accesses the collective well of human experience. The alchemical blend of archaic and contemporary musical techniques and instruments, including the voice, activate a powerful opening into sacred space.
Music
The rich landscapes invoked by Inanna’s Dream are borne from a life deeply dedicated to music and the healing arts. Alongside her work in holistic medicine, Serena Gabriel has been intently exploring the interweave of ancient musical instrumentation with modern technology. Intention, physical movement and breath guide her path in the creative process. This dance of energy is expressed, for example, through the breathing bellows of the harmonium, the earth tones of the didgeridoo and vocals that originate from a place of devoted authenticity. Adding to the vocabulary are various drums and percussion, flutes and lyre which breathe life into the live looping techniques, audio effects and synthesizer textures. Inanna’s Dream is produced by ambient pioneer Steve Roach and is the premier release on his new Soundquest Music label.The project also features his unique atmospheric contributions, adding yet another soulful infusion to the album’s soundworld mythology. As the listener embarks upon Inanna’s Dream, Serpentine and the title track set the course by way of a ceremonial opening, conjuring the spirits through elements such as didge drones, the mystic callings of clay and wooden flutes and frame drum resonations guided by Serena’s emotive vocals and chant incantations. Traveling on, The Dunes of Solace with its melodic harmonium woven tapestry and Song of Sending with its poignant wordless vocals reveal a universal sense of longing, reverie and reconciliation. At this point, The Gazing Pool appears in a mirage like oasis, offering a tranquil alchemical combination of Steve’s radiant ambient guitar and synth atmospherics with the lustrous quality of Serena’s lyre. The closing track, Changing Tides, is a gorgeous electro acoustic slow flow of pure serenity and deep calm. Serena’s lilting Harmonium and Nord Lead synth waves ebb and flow with Steve’s lush Oberheim orchestrations; this combination creates a unique and truly timeless space of boundless oceanic grace.
Inanna’s Dream is a dynamic radiant transmission celebrating the multi faceted richness of life, in all of its exquisite beauty.

Artist: Steve Roach + Serena Gabriel
P: 2020
NECTAR MEDITATION is the debut collaboration from Steve Roach (synths) and Serena Gabriel (harmonium, voice, temple bells). The focus of their work together is to provide a potent, immersive and transcendent experience through the power of sound. This intention is activated through the combination of acoustic instrumentation of ancient origins with a vast array of vintage and current analog synthesizers, creating a compelling new hybrid of archaic and contemporary sacred space music.
A continuous 74-minute balm for the body, mind and soul, manifested from what could potentially be an unheard of fusion until now, the core of NECTAR MEDITATION is a unique blend of the diaphanous breathing, emotional waves of Serena's harmonium with the deep resonance of Steve's iconic Oberheim analog synth palette.
As this soulful journey unfolds it is carried even deeper upon a pachyderm-paced mantra beat passage by guest Byron Metcalf, offering rhythm to the revelations of the sonic sojourner. Initiated upon a visionary landscape, this sonic elixir gently builds and holds space for a contemplation upon the majestic unknown.
About Serena Gabriel:
As a musician, dancer, healing arts practitioner and medicine music provider, Serena brings years of experience working with sound and vibrational therapies to infuse her evocative vocals, chants, mantras and music from a wide collection of unique and custom handmade instruments. She is equally at home in her recording studio full of synthesizers, loopers and effects while surrounded by an acoustic sonic palette of harmoniums, didgeridoos, flutes and percussion.
It is Serena's aspiration that her dedication to the vast potential of sound for positive transformation can be experienced through the essence of the musical offerings she creates, providing inspiration and support to the listener.