They are pure drift ambient, monolithic slabs of reverby synth pads with little variation.
Download buku buku islam gratis series#
The Immersion series is a collection of long-form pieces, by which I mean they average an hour plus. The other four tracks are good examples of Roach’s drift ambient (big pads) and also feature some tranquil field recordings. It also scares the crap out of my cat for some reason.
It puts me in a wonderful state of mind that few pieces can achieve. “Perfect Dream” consists of a massive wave of undulating bass synth that repeats over and over, with more delicate synth sounds in an interplay underneath. This is quite possibly my favourite Roach album, and that perception could be based on the first track alone. But yet another essential ambient release. Ah hell, it’s hard to capture these things in words. There’s a pervasive feeling of the fecundity of nature, overgrowing everything in a jungle environment, kind of rainy and soggy. Some pieces are prettier, some atonal, and some feature otherwordly birdies chirping. While the mood of this music is not generally dark, there’s a mysteriousness to the ever-shifting tones and the odd whistly sounds that linger in the background of many of the pieces. This is a four-disk set of one long-form piece and three disks of shorter pieces. Mystic Chords and Sacred Spaces (2003)Īnother mega-release. For the entire span the mournful sounds weave in and out through a miasma of reverb - this isn’t so much peaceful as it is trance-inducing. It sounds like it was recorded in the deepest depths of space (in theory, I know space is a vacuum) or in the cavernous belly of a spacecraft. Probably the best known of Roach’s long-form seventy-minute albums, Darkest Before Dawn is pure dark ambient, so dark that most Goths would probably be scared off. And dang if it’s not totally successful! A highly influential recording that still holds up today. Inspired by Australian Aboriginal culture, the album is a mixture of trancelike beats (but slow ones, so don’t be expecting no techno), combined with the organic sounds of didgeridoo, Aboriginal percussion and chants, and mysterious synth sounds, meant to conjure up a mystical vision of the dreamtime. This pioneering release (two disks, of course) is where Roach started his tribal ambient journey. I can honestly say that there is no better music for quiet meditation than the music on these recordings. Again, the music is quite sparse and gentle with lots of space between the notes for reflection, with some nature field recordings added. The music was commissioned for healing arts programs, which means the emphasis is on a deep, reassuring pastoral spirituality. Structures from Silence is one of the albums essential to an ambient music collection.Īnother essential early album, this is a collection of material first issued on three cassettes. The pieces are also quite pleasantly minimalistic and sparse, showing a departure from the early European Berlin-school influences on a lot of early eighties synth music. As noted on ye olde Wikipedia, this is his first “purely textural” album, meaning the pieces are long and are given space to stretch out. Generally considered his first classic and a touchstone of ambient in general, this is three long, peaceful synth-based pieces. On Roach’s site you can sample basically all of his stuff, so see the link at the end of the post. So you have no excuse if are curious enough to consider a purchase. Note that all of these recordings are readily available in physical form from Roach but also from all ye online retaylers, such as Emusic, iTunes, etc.
I certainly will not claim to have purchased anything close to his entire output, but I do have roughly fifty of his recordings, both solo and in collaboration, so I think I have as good an idea as anyone of the best ten albums to start your Roach journey with (I won’t be making any pot jokes). Roach’s discography is pretty intimidating for a listener new to him who wants to start with the best.
And his output is pleasantly restless - he’s pioneered tribal, rhythmic ambient dark ambient long-form “drift ambient” the use of field recordings avant garde atonal ambient, you name it, he’s done it. He releases sometimes a few albums a year, so over a long career that’s a ton of music.
Roach has been making ambient music, and lots of it, since the early eighties, a pioneer out on the west side of America along with Robert Rich, Michael Stearns, Kevin Braheny, and other early astral voyagers (all of whom are still going strong). But if you know anything about the genre, as opposed to being a dabbler, you know who Roach is, whereas all those Philistines out there only know the Eno brand. If there is an overarching figure in the world of ambient music, American Steve Roach is unquestionably that person.