Roach, Steve

Artist: Steve Roach & Vir Unis
P: 1999
On this project, I set out to create a perfect blend of searing, light-filled soundworlds of relentless beauty merged with a constantly shifting interplay of "mandala grooves" that never overwhelm the atmospheres, taking the music to a high place. For me, it's the answer to the question of balance between the two dynamic elements in my music that are always calling me deeper. It's also a fitting metaphor in day to day life as well: the motion of momentum and the call to repose. I feel like this one came together in all the right ways, with the build to "Touch the Pearl", "Realm of Refraction" and "The Luminous Return" expressing a quality of emotions that I have been reaching toward for years.

1999 Steve Roach
 

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2008 
This new long-form zone billows out like a big sigh of time, breathing steady and strong. Minimal and infinite in its essence, like all of Steve's long-form zones this is a functional soundworld specifically created to enhance the atmosphere of your personal sanctuary, your living environment and beyond. Lower volume playback increases the potency. This sound space serves as a kind of portal to states of subtle awareness, and is perfect for the support of deeper sleeping as well.

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2020
A SOUL ASCENDS is a majestic, deeply moving sonic suspension drawn from the essence of Steve Roach's visionary ambient / electronic music. A vast and intimate holding-the-space of heart-centered serenity and compassion, the album couples the body to the eternal flow of a vaporizing weightlessness — back to a divine nothingness, the Tabula Rasa where everything began.
Created at Steve's Timehouse Studio over seven days in mid-April 2020, this music was sourced from and created for this unequaled moment in our lifetime. The three movements express the delicate and profound innerplay of contemplative space, tone and time. The expansive, lush timbral embrace has an undeniable connection to the DNA of Steve's classic-era STRUCTURES FROM SILENCE and QUIET MUSIC releases.
A SOUL ASCENDS is like a language all its own: a life in consolidation from which the next breath activates. The space reaches for you, lifts you out, and draws you in like an enveloping etheric presence. This sense of an omnipresent dimension of tranquility and transcendence is the heart of A SOUL ASCENDS.

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2009    
After the stillness comes the AFTERLIGHT. Created in the Spring of 2009, in the afterglow of DYNAMIC STILLNESS, this long-form piece delivers the listener deep inside a multi-dimensional realm of forming clouds, an endless expanse with no boundaries or sense of temporal limits. Amorphous strands of harmonic lumina emerge and recede in a constant unfolding and reconfiguring state for the duration of this pure atmospheric suspension. This piece, along with its two companion releases DESTINATION BEYOND and IMMERSION: FOUR were created over the the same time period, and all share a common sense of breath, interconnection and pursuit of timelessness. Refined over several months, the piece was kept in constant low-volume playback during sleep, rest and times of reflection. The ongoing experience of living with the piece, and shaping it before its release into the world, has become a vital part of Steve's immersion process, going back to 1984's STRUCTURES FROM SILENCE.

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2015 
In many ways this is the pinnacle moment in the soundworlds of Steve Roach. A singular expression of an artist reaching for a high plateau in his artistic vision and life's work. This release was created live within this rarefied setting, a realm of total sonic immersion. The fortuitous alignment of everything surrounding the event combined to make ALIVE IN THE VORTEX a unique moment. The audience became part of what evolved into a live-in-the-studio experience while sharing a collective aural-visual dream. Includes a 16-page booklet filled with concert images and more.

In Steve's words...

The immense preparation to present this sonic journey in this perfect environment started nearly a year in advance. The first version of this set was presented at the Ambicon Festival earlier in the year, and the arc of this music reached its zenith in the Dome. After hearing the recording, I felt this was the document I wanted to leave behind for someone to experience in 50 years. The extraordinary visual worlds of Audri Phillips' live animated immersion was integral to the complete experience, wrapping us all in a womb-like expansiveness.
Held in the throbbing heart of downtown Los Angeles, this marked my live concert return to L.A. after a seventeen-year absence. With many years living in the desert and presenting my work worldwide, the journey back to where so much started for me in the 80's added a dimension of emotion drawn from the reflections of time's passage. On many levels, this informed the evolution of the set throughout the night.
As the final breath of sound faded back into void at the concert's conclusion, the churning of the world outside created a dramatic return. The roar of traffic, sirens in the distance, the whirling of helicopters outside the safety of the Dome provided a surreal and poignant contrast for everyone who had been transported within the space. At this moment, we all felt a little more alive within the vortex of life.

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2002
Fresh from concerts in 2002, this purely live double-CD release presents the current evolution of Steve's iconoclastic live experience captured at select U.S. dates earlier this year. For the duration of the first half of this year, Steve was on a constant program of performing on the road, then returning home for a few weeks at a time, setting up the live system in The Timeroom to create new sounds and reflect on previous concerts. This proved to be a refreshing alternative to the tour-'til-you-drop approach as the evolution of the music and soundworlds were greatly enhanced by this process. Elements from CORE, STREAMS & CURRENTS, EARLY MAN and INNERZONE are here, but the spontaneous moments within these two CD's, along with many new pieces and spaces created just for these events, gives this experience an atmosphere than can only come from stepping out from the safety of the studio environment. From the intimate to the immediate, the intensity of these sound journeys with the audience onboard is clearly captured and alive. The 'mobile Timeroom' events were recorded at Sedona Arizona, Oakland and San Francisco California, Portland Oregon, and the SFMOMA / Yoko Ono event.

Artist: Steve Roach 
P: 2022
For over thirty five years, Steve Roach has performed in awe inspiring spaces around the world. From a massive cave on the Canary Islands, cathedrals in Europe and the US, to a volcanic lava bed encircled with 64 stone monoliths in Mexico City, all of these experiences informed Steve’s invitation to perform a two-hour set within the historic Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York City in June 2022. Roach built the set's flow with classic tracks and pieces composed specifically for the massive acoustic sacred space which served as the container for the unparalleled sound and light experience of this music. The result is a magnificent recording unlike any in Steve’s catalog. With the cathedral at full capacity, well over 1000 people experienced a pinnacle moment including the performance of iconic "Structures from Silence” reverberating within the massive stone walls. The full range of Roach’s dynamic soundworlds takes on a symphonic experience; the embrace of a truly monolithic sacred space and captivated audience influenced the music’s creation. This is the realm in which Roach’s music truly soars — the place it is destined to be experienced — and is now here immersed within this magnificent release.

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2007
Three striking new pieces born from the moment. Steve Roach's new 2-CD set seamlessly fuses three long unfolding soundworlds into a vibrant sonic odyssey. The result can only be described as a living, breathing ARC OF PASSION. As one of the pioneers of electronic music, Steve's career has many musical highpoints; ARC OF PASSION proves to be another definitive statement along the path. Advanced response from listeners places this album at the top of the list of must-have releases from Steve's body of work. Steve reaches into his sonic palette to weave elements drawn from his three definitive styles into a continuous, evolving flow. Rich harmonic chords, spiraling sequences and deep sky soundworlds move fluidly within this 2-hour set.
A vibrant immediacy is alive on ARC OF PASSION; recorded in a studio-like environment at Analogue Haven with an audience of 80 people, the sonic textures and evolving nature of the pieces reach into the core of the present moment bringing it into form with elegance and energy.
The opening 19-minute track billows outwards with rich and shadowed harmonic movement; deep chords ebb and flow like the thunder clouds of a summer storm, entering the realm of the hauntingly serene MYSTIC CHORDS & SACRED SPACES or THE MAGNIFICENT VOID albums. The set flows into the 60-minute title track built from layers of percussive and melodic patterns interwoven and evolving while holding a steady pulse and direction. Waves of emotion from intertwining sequencers provide the foundation for the evolving trance patterns that develop into full mesmerizing, passionate form. The closing 20-minute piece is deep primal ambience mixed with processed didgeridoo hovering within an expansive soundscape. Long, arching tendril-like forms breathe within this infinite soundfield.
Steve comments: "This arc represents a trajectory of emotion infused with energy from a radiant, serene core that comes from within the creative moment."
ARC OF PASSION is a deep and vibrant expression of life lived passionately.

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 1994
This release explores his growing ability with instruments such as didgeridoos, framedrums, dumbek, rainsticks, ocarina, and clay flutes and displays a level of electronic artistry that is approaching legendary. Textured rhythms create a unique, trance-like quality that sounds equally primal and futuristic.
Natural and artificial artifacts, from past and future; artifacts touched by a divine light; artifacts still hidden in the folds of time and earth, come back to life through a higher will and by natural cycles not ruled by Man. Frogs that come from nowhere at sunset to lift their secular verse towards heaven; invisible noises of water and air; rain, earth and fossils united in a cosmic chant; vegetal seeds, wood, clay. Everything is music and sound in this new spiritual testament from Steve Roach, a sonic spiral dreamt in one of the many nights spent in the desert searching for his own identity. By now Roach has found his way and appears each time to be more in a state of grace, thanks to his repeated contacts with australian aborigines and to his companion Linda Kohanov who, in my opinion, is his link to heaven.
Roach, the Chosen One, is closer than ever to the sound of silence, to the music of the origin, to contemplation.

Artist: Steve Roach
P: 2021
As a sonic continuation and response to last year's optimistic release Tomorrow, AS IT IS is a revelatory experience of mystical, captivating electronic music. It travels the soul's pathway of renewal following the dramatic year we've just emerged from. Filled with texture and subtle nuance, this is a spacious album of organic analog electronic music with a breath and heartbeat; a simmering, churning, moving appointment with reality. The album maps a hero's journey, taking the immersed, active listener out of consensus reality through secluded deeply personal spaces, suspended soundworlds, through tears to eventually emerge revitalized.
"It's an emotional, psychological, spiritual triad," Steve describes, "a deep engagement exploring the psychology of sound: expanded consciousness creating meaning out of sonic abstraction."