Steve Roach - Dynamic Stillness

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: 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.

Here a sepecial offer of a second hand CD with a punch hole at the booklet.

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