Steve Roach - Artifacts

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: 2009    
DYNAMIC STILLNESS is a vast new work that has progressed over the past three years, evolving in its own time alongside the many other releases that were created and released during this period. The opening for these pieces was accessed through long periods of solitude at Steve's high desert studio and beyond. This environment was essential for informing the inner breath of this work and revealing a mastery within the art of original sound creation, bold harmonic structures, silence and sonic space. DYNAMIC STILLNESS reaches into a realm of amorphous soundworlds filled with a sense of unresolved expansion and mystery, blooming into cloudlike form.
"A moving meditation on the quiet power inherent in vast spaces. Roach has come back around to the slow-motion terraforming of soundworlds that seem to go on forever, pulling skeins of light through layers of cloud to describe gorgeous imaginary landscapes. Reminiscent of the sighing, beatless drifts of THE DREAM CIRCLE and THE MAGNIFICENT VOID in its blend of soul-surrounding calm edged with dramatic tension, DYNAMIC STILLNESS is Roach at his contemplative best, a sure and silent guide coaxing us to follow him into the endless realms inside ourselves."
"Mysteriously beautiful, ambient electronic waveforms bridging panorama and parsec. The singularities guiding Roach's hand are now unquestionable -- this is breathtaking stuff."
"DYNAMIC STILLNESS presents ambient-electronic pioneer Steve Roach in the deep end of the pure atmospheric, rhythmless soundscape genre. Across the 2-CD release, amorphous shifting sonics glide in a phenomenal flow, highly cohesive and yet ever-changing. Dynamic stillness indeed! These eight long-form tracks (140 minutes in all) undulate softly and slowly, radiating light even as darkness hovers along the edges. It's an album of subtle pieces, more often than not with emphasis on the stillness as opposed to the dynamics. Disc two's closing 'Canyon Stillness' plays like a dark inversion of STRUCTURES FROM SILENCE. A cold breeze blows through it all like a black mist. After so much softness it makes for a surprisingly chilling, engaging finish."

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