Hello, this is my 4th posting on Steve Roach, it will be the last one this year, Steve is a painter with sound and as such his discography is impressive with well over 120 high quality albums, he keeps himself sharp by working with others who in return lift on his ever increasing status in the world of (tribal) ambient. That said I think i would do then Sundaze fans a disservice if i kept posting his work for months on end (i could), hence you'll have to wait another year for another month of Steve Roach...
Today's Artist is a longstanding leader in contemporary electronic music, composer and multi-instrumentalist,a onetime professional motorbike racer born 1955 in La Mesa, California, drew on the beauty and power of the earth's landscapes to create lush, meditative soundscapes influential on the emergence of ambient and trance. Drawing from a vast, unique, deeply personal authenticity, his releases cover a wide range of dynamic styles all of which bear his signature voice. For 35 years the boundaries are constantly challenged in his work, ranging in style from pure floating spaces, analog sequencer music, primordial tribal, rhythmic ambient, dark ambient, long-form 'drift ambient,' and avant garde atonal ambient.....N'Joy
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
A longstanding leader in contemporary electronic music, composer and multi-instrumentalist Steve Roach drew on the beauty and power of the Earth's landscapes to create lush, meditative soundscapes influential on the emergence of ambient and trance. Born in California in 1955, Roach -- inspired by the music of Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Vangelis -- taught himself to play synthesizer at the age of 20. Debuting in 1982 with the album Now, his early work was quite reminiscent of his inspirations, but with 1984's Structures from Silence, his music began taking enormous strides. The album's expansive and mysterious atmosphere was partly inspired by the natural beauty of the southwestern U.S. Subsequent works, including 1986's three-volume Quiet Music series honed Roach's approach, his dense, swirling textures and hypnotic rhythms akin to environmental sound sculptures.
In 1988, inspired by the Peter Weir film The Last Wave, Roach journeyed to the Australian outback, with field recordings of aboriginal life inspiring his acknowledged masterpiece, the double-album Dreamtime Return. A year later, he teamed with percussionist Michael Shrieve and guitarist David Torn for The Leaving Time, an experiment in ambient jazz. After relocating to the desert outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, Roach established his own recording studio, Timeroom. In the years to follow, he grew increasingly prolific, creating both as a solo artist and in tandem with acts including Robert Rich, Michael Stearns, Jorge Reyes, and Kevin Braheny -- in all, he recorded close to two-dozen major works in the '90s alone, all of them located at different points on the space-time continuum separating modern technology and primitive music.
His album roster from that decade includes Strata (1991), Artifacts (1994), Well of Souls (1995), Amplexus (1997), and Dust to Dust (1998). Early Man was released on Projekt in early 2001, followed by one of his many collaborations with Vidna Obmana, Innerzone. Throughout the remainder of the 2000s, Roach remained extremely prolific. His release schedule included the Projekt titles Trance Spirits (with Jeffrey Fayman) and the quadruple-disc Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces, Spirit Dome and Somewhere Else (with Obmana), Fever Dreams, Mantram, and Nada Terma (with Byron Metcalf and Mark Seelig), and the ongoing Immersion series, Arc of Passion, and Stream of Thought (with Erik Wøllo). He also self-released several titles on his own through Timeroom Editions.
Over the next decade, Roach would show no signs of slowing as he continued with a non-stop slew of new material under his own name, as well as collaborations and soundtrack work. Though new volumes of work appeared at a clip of more than three albums per year, standouts included more collaborations with Byron Metcalf, 2013's Future Flows, 2014's disparate releases of arid road trip music on The Desert Collection and ambient explorations of mortality and humanity on The Delicate Forever. Roach began constructing an extensive analog modular synthesizer system in 2014, and in 2015, the album Skeleton Keys was composed entirely using this setup. In 2016, Roach released two full-lengths with Robert Logan (the more rhythmic Biosonic and the serene drone album Second Nature), as well as solo efforts This Place to Be and Shadow of Time.
In concert, Steve creates transcendent electronic music emerging from an elemental instinctual mode. These events bring together an audience from around the country and as far away as Europe, all looking to experience the on-the-edge experience that erupts in the live setting. This makes Steve's concerts an entirely different experience from the recorded medium. With months of preparation absorbed into his system, evocative soundscapes blend with ecstatic rhythmic sections born from hands-on analog sound creation and sonic shapeshifting. The result is a direct transference of creative energy from the artist through his instruments out to the listener. Live performances are the place where Steve's music thrives, created at the leading edge of now.
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
Steve Roach has an impressive body of recordings; however, Origins may be his most striking release to date. Continually intrigued by Aboriginal culture and music, its influence can be heard on this release...Driven by hybrid percussion, synthesized melodies, gravel-voiced chants and didgeridoo, Origins brings our most elusive dreams and primeval memories into focus through potent sonic essays. "Clay, Wood, Bone, Dirt" is a stunning acoustic duo featuring Roach and Jorge Reyes, who plays clay water pots on this selection. Suso Saiz provides his own brand of hypnotic guitar textures on several selections as well.
Steve Roach - Origens (flac 310mb)
01 Fearless 4:32
02 Mica 5:00
03 Forever 4:50
04 The Grotto Of Time Lost 9:03
05 Iguana 7:23
06 Magma 3:37
07 Persistence Of Memory (For Dali) 5:09
08 Remembrance 2:22
09 Ceremony Of Shadows 6:12
10 La Luna 10:39
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Solitaire is a group project that allows Elmar Schulte to perform with other notables. Rudiger Gleisberg has been a semi-regular member and Amir Baghiri has been a guest. Schulte has performed in minimalist, rhythmic, and tribal styles with those guests. Ritual Ground is an electro-tribal album that features the master of the style -- Steve Roach. This is a benchmark album, Schulte and Roach perform in the darker zones of the tribal realm. There are echoes of Roach's desert ambience and the pace is slow. The languid atmospheres surround deep listeners and the soundscapes are expansive. This album, like all discs involving Roach, is on its own level.
Solitaire (Steve Roach with Elmar Schulte) - Ritual Ground (flac 234mb)
01 Black Cloud 6:28
02 Turning World 7:43
03 North Sky 7:27
04 Rapt In Darkness 4:41
05 Solid Ground 6:43
06 Runes 9:47
07 In The Forest Of Ancient Light 13:52
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Ron Sunsinger, a Native American tribal artist and musician, joins two space music pioneers on Kiva, an atmospheric re-creation of sacred tribal ceremonies representing the directions of the Four Winds. For the Southwest tribes, a kiva is a circular subterranean structure used for ceremony and ritual; other tribes may use a canopy of trees, the circular space of a Sun Dance, or a cavern. For this recording, Sunsinger obtained, with permission, field recordings of traditional ceremonies. The musicians then brought the kiva space into their music studio. Each wind direction is preceded by an atmospheric passage of chanting, nature sounds, and rattles. "East Kiva: Calling in the Midnight Water" features chanting with the rattles and rapid drumbeats of a peyote ceremony. The space music continues the ceremony to an expanded heartbeat, with horns signaling breakthroughs of thunder strikes. A more celestial space is heralded by organ tones and crickets. Hearing the overlapping layers of sound and the progression allows the listener's mind to travel, while still being connected to the ceremonial music and rhythms. Ghostly voices usher in the passage to "South Kiva: Mother Ayahuasca." Here, breathy whistles and a hypnotic twang of a stringed instrument begin a trance that takes off on one of the most dramatic space blastoffs on record. It climaxes through shouts and ceremonial purging, a sacred song, and whistling; the organ/chanting drone background is very trippy with its sonic infinity pattern of organ tones, chanting, jungle birds, and distorted drumming. "West Kiva: Sacrifice, Prayer and Visions" includes the powerful powwow drumming, singing, and stomped bells of the Native American Sun Dance. The space music collides sounds and rhythms -- a dizzying and hallucinatory clash of reality and illusion. The music then "passes out" and takes the listener on a voyage through a sonic tunnel where all time is suspended. The final "North Kiva: Trust and Remember," recorded in a cavern, thunders with resonant drums and the growls of the didgeridoo. This recording is an excellent introduction to space music and the shamanic experience. You'll find it's not a free ride.
Steve Roach (with Michael Stearns and Ron Sunsinger) - Kiva (flac 341mb)
01 Passage One 2:27
02 East Kiva - Calling In The Midnight Water 13:42
03 Passage Two 1:59
04 South Kiva - Mother Ayahuasca 15:13
05 Passage Three 2:12
06 West Kiva - Sacrifice, Prayer, And Visions 17:27
07 Passage Four 2:00
08 North Kiva - Trust And Remember 9:42
09 The Center 2:33
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This double album is stretching in total over 124 minutes with not one second of excess, it marks the beginning of a destined musical partnership.. It's a soundtrack to the most beautiful dreams you'll ever experience in waking life. Put it on repeat play, darken the room, light a few candles and lose yourself within it's shifting mist walkways for a couple of weeks.
The album starts with a dark and mysterious journey, through Ancient Eastern alleyways, the air scented with desiccated humanity & seductive spices, blended now and then with the stink of ordure and rot. In the sand-coloured, dimly lit streets, rhythm can be heard, floating on the air, lulling the listener, seducing, beckoning. Before the rhythms of the second track well up from the darkness, the atmosphere remains one impending doom. Track three visits similar places with a lighter atmosphere, while the closing track for the first disc transforms from a drifting passive thing, using ethnic devices like Rain Sticks, into another tranquil rhythm, sounding like an opiate-shot Muslimgauze.
The opening to the second disc glitters out of the speakers like mysterious starlight, gentle waves of soothing, strange sound passing over you as if trying to describe the firmament from some other position in the universe, a place unseen, unimagined by humankind. Track two, the title track, continues the planetarium ambience, exploring yet more constellations, the gentlest of orreries dancing their dreamstate dance. Track three explores a deeper, more earth-bound, yet no less calming place. Deep warm tones well up while sustaining harmonies and thunderous noises resound. The atmosphere is one of restfulness, a welcoming womb of enveloping soundwaves. A nest for tired minds to hibernate - an asylum of peace. The fourth and final track in this collection could be a performance in a natural, cathedral-like cave - the tones are warm and non-linear, drifting like woodsmoke through an arid landscape. Rich, lulling, mysterious.
Steve Roach with Vidna Obmana - Well of Souls (flac 570mb)
01 In The Presence Of Something 9:57
02 In The Realm Of Twilight - Outlands One 13:13
03 The Secret Arrival - Outlands Two 14:08
04 The Gathering 24:08
cd 2
05 Deep Hours 29:24
06 Well Of Souls 25:58
07 The Quiet Companion 8:14
08 The Dwelling Place 9:02
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
Today's Artist is a longstanding leader in contemporary electronic music, composer and multi-instrumentalist,a onetime professional motorbike racer born 1955 in La Mesa, California, drew on the beauty and power of the earth's landscapes to create lush, meditative soundscapes influential on the emergence of ambient and trance. Drawing from a vast, unique, deeply personal authenticity, his releases cover a wide range of dynamic styles all of which bear his signature voice. For 35 years the boundaries are constantly challenged in his work, ranging in style from pure floating spaces, analog sequencer music, primordial tribal, rhythmic ambient, dark ambient, long-form 'drift ambient,' and avant garde atonal ambient.....N'Joy
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
A longstanding leader in contemporary electronic music, composer and multi-instrumentalist Steve Roach drew on the beauty and power of the Earth's landscapes to create lush, meditative soundscapes influential on the emergence of ambient and trance. Born in California in 1955, Roach -- inspired by the music of Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Vangelis -- taught himself to play synthesizer at the age of 20. Debuting in 1982 with the album Now, his early work was quite reminiscent of his inspirations, but with 1984's Structures from Silence, his music began taking enormous strides. The album's expansive and mysterious atmosphere was partly inspired by the natural beauty of the southwestern U.S. Subsequent works, including 1986's three-volume Quiet Music series honed Roach's approach, his dense, swirling textures and hypnotic rhythms akin to environmental sound sculptures.
In 1988, inspired by the Peter Weir film The Last Wave, Roach journeyed to the Australian outback, with field recordings of aboriginal life inspiring his acknowledged masterpiece, the double-album Dreamtime Return. A year later, he teamed with percussionist Michael Shrieve and guitarist David Torn for The Leaving Time, an experiment in ambient jazz. After relocating to the desert outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, Roach established his own recording studio, Timeroom. In the years to follow, he grew increasingly prolific, creating both as a solo artist and in tandem with acts including Robert Rich, Michael Stearns, Jorge Reyes, and Kevin Braheny -- in all, he recorded close to two-dozen major works in the '90s alone, all of them located at different points on the space-time continuum separating modern technology and primitive music.
His album roster from that decade includes Strata (1991), Artifacts (1994), Well of Souls (1995), Amplexus (1997), and Dust to Dust (1998). Early Man was released on Projekt in early 2001, followed by one of his many collaborations with Vidna Obmana, Innerzone. Throughout the remainder of the 2000s, Roach remained extremely prolific. His release schedule included the Projekt titles Trance Spirits (with Jeffrey Fayman) and the quadruple-disc Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces, Spirit Dome and Somewhere Else (with Obmana), Fever Dreams, Mantram, and Nada Terma (with Byron Metcalf and Mark Seelig), and the ongoing Immersion series, Arc of Passion, and Stream of Thought (with Erik Wøllo). He also self-released several titles on his own through Timeroom Editions.
Over the next decade, Roach would show no signs of slowing as he continued with a non-stop slew of new material under his own name, as well as collaborations and soundtrack work. Though new volumes of work appeared at a clip of more than three albums per year, standouts included more collaborations with Byron Metcalf, 2013's Future Flows, 2014's disparate releases of arid road trip music on The Desert Collection and ambient explorations of mortality and humanity on The Delicate Forever. Roach began constructing an extensive analog modular synthesizer system in 2014, and in 2015, the album Skeleton Keys was composed entirely using this setup. In 2016, Roach released two full-lengths with Robert Logan (the more rhythmic Biosonic and the serene drone album Second Nature), as well as solo efforts This Place to Be and Shadow of Time.
In concert, Steve creates transcendent electronic music emerging from an elemental instinctual mode. These events bring together an audience from around the country and as far away as Europe, all looking to experience the on-the-edge experience that erupts in the live setting. This makes Steve's concerts an entirely different experience from the recorded medium. With months of preparation absorbed into his system, evocative soundscapes blend with ecstatic rhythmic sections born from hands-on analog sound creation and sonic shapeshifting. The result is a direct transference of creative energy from the artist through his instruments out to the listener. Live performances are the place where Steve's music thrives, created at the leading edge of now.
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
Steve Roach has an impressive body of recordings; however, Origins may be his most striking release to date. Continually intrigued by Aboriginal culture and music, its influence can be heard on this release...Driven by hybrid percussion, synthesized melodies, gravel-voiced chants and didgeridoo, Origins brings our most elusive dreams and primeval memories into focus through potent sonic essays. "Clay, Wood, Bone, Dirt" is a stunning acoustic duo featuring Roach and Jorge Reyes, who plays clay water pots on this selection. Suso Saiz provides his own brand of hypnotic guitar textures on several selections as well.
Steve Roach - Origens (flac 310mb)
01 Fearless 4:32
02 Mica 5:00
03 Forever 4:50
04 The Grotto Of Time Lost 9:03
05 Iguana 7:23
06 Magma 3:37
07 Persistence Of Memory (For Dali) 5:09
08 Remembrance 2:22
09 Ceremony Of Shadows 6:12
10 La Luna 10:39
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
Solitaire is a group project that allows Elmar Schulte to perform with other notables. Rudiger Gleisberg has been a semi-regular member and Amir Baghiri has been a guest. Schulte has performed in minimalist, rhythmic, and tribal styles with those guests. Ritual Ground is an electro-tribal album that features the master of the style -- Steve Roach. This is a benchmark album, Schulte and Roach perform in the darker zones of the tribal realm. There are echoes of Roach's desert ambience and the pace is slow. The languid atmospheres surround deep listeners and the soundscapes are expansive. This album, like all discs involving Roach, is on its own level.
Solitaire (Steve Roach with Elmar Schulte) - Ritual Ground (flac 234mb)
01 Black Cloud 6:28
02 Turning World 7:43
03 North Sky 7:27
04 Rapt In Darkness 4:41
05 Solid Ground 6:43
06 Runes 9:47
07 In The Forest Of Ancient Light 13:52
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
Ron Sunsinger, a Native American tribal artist and musician, joins two space music pioneers on Kiva, an atmospheric re-creation of sacred tribal ceremonies representing the directions of the Four Winds. For the Southwest tribes, a kiva is a circular subterranean structure used for ceremony and ritual; other tribes may use a canopy of trees, the circular space of a Sun Dance, or a cavern. For this recording, Sunsinger obtained, with permission, field recordings of traditional ceremonies. The musicians then brought the kiva space into their music studio. Each wind direction is preceded by an atmospheric passage of chanting, nature sounds, and rattles. "East Kiva: Calling in the Midnight Water" features chanting with the rattles and rapid drumbeats of a peyote ceremony. The space music continues the ceremony to an expanded heartbeat, with horns signaling breakthroughs of thunder strikes. A more celestial space is heralded by organ tones and crickets. Hearing the overlapping layers of sound and the progression allows the listener's mind to travel, while still being connected to the ceremonial music and rhythms. Ghostly voices usher in the passage to "South Kiva: Mother Ayahuasca." Here, breathy whistles and a hypnotic twang of a stringed instrument begin a trance that takes off on one of the most dramatic space blastoffs on record. It climaxes through shouts and ceremonial purging, a sacred song, and whistling; the organ/chanting drone background is very trippy with its sonic infinity pattern of organ tones, chanting, jungle birds, and distorted drumming. "West Kiva: Sacrifice, Prayer and Visions" includes the powerful powwow drumming, singing, and stomped bells of the Native American Sun Dance. The space music collides sounds and rhythms -- a dizzying and hallucinatory clash of reality and illusion. The music then "passes out" and takes the listener on a voyage through a sonic tunnel where all time is suspended. The final "North Kiva: Trust and Remember," recorded in a cavern, thunders with resonant drums and the growls of the didgeridoo. This recording is an excellent introduction to space music and the shamanic experience. You'll find it's not a free ride.
Steve Roach (with Michael Stearns and Ron Sunsinger) - Kiva (flac 341mb)
01 Passage One 2:27
02 East Kiva - Calling In The Midnight Water 13:42
03 Passage Two 1:59
04 South Kiva - Mother Ayahuasca 15:13
05 Passage Three 2:12
06 West Kiva - Sacrifice, Prayer, And Visions 17:27
07 Passage Four 2:00
08 North Kiva - Trust And Remember 9:42
09 The Center 2:33
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
This double album is stretching in total over 124 minutes with not one second of excess, it marks the beginning of a destined musical partnership.. It's a soundtrack to the most beautiful dreams you'll ever experience in waking life. Put it on repeat play, darken the room, light a few candles and lose yourself within it's shifting mist walkways for a couple of weeks.
The album starts with a dark and mysterious journey, through Ancient Eastern alleyways, the air scented with desiccated humanity & seductive spices, blended now and then with the stink of ordure and rot. In the sand-coloured, dimly lit streets, rhythm can be heard, floating on the air, lulling the listener, seducing, beckoning. Before the rhythms of the second track well up from the darkness, the atmosphere remains one impending doom. Track three visits similar places with a lighter atmosphere, while the closing track for the first disc transforms from a drifting passive thing, using ethnic devices like Rain Sticks, into another tranquil rhythm, sounding like an opiate-shot Muslimgauze.
The opening to the second disc glitters out of the speakers like mysterious starlight, gentle waves of soothing, strange sound passing over you as if trying to describe the firmament from some other position in the universe, a place unseen, unimagined by humankind. Track two, the title track, continues the planetarium ambience, exploring yet more constellations, the gentlest of orreries dancing their dreamstate dance. Track three explores a deeper, more earth-bound, yet no less calming place. Deep warm tones well up while sustaining harmonies and thunderous noises resound. The atmosphere is one of restfulness, a welcoming womb of enveloping soundwaves. A nest for tired minds to hibernate - an asylum of peace. The fourth and final track in this collection could be a performance in a natural, cathedral-like cave - the tones are warm and non-linear, drifting like woodsmoke through an arid landscape. Rich, lulling, mysterious.
Steve Roach with Vidna Obmana - Well of Souls (flac 570mb)
01 In The Presence Of Something 9:57
02 In The Realm Of Twilight - Outlands One 13:13
03 The Secret Arrival - Outlands Two 14:08
04 The Gathering 24:08
cd 2
05 Deep Hours 29:24
06 Well Of Souls 25:58
07 The Quiet Companion 8:14
08 The Dwelling Place 9:02
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
6 comments:
This last month of Sundaze has been such a pleasure, Rho. I would like to thank you twice, in fact - once for the wonderful albums that you have offered and again for providing the option to choose to download in .ogg! :)
Rho, thank you very much. Thanks not only for the constant supply of great music but thanks also for the multiple high speed download options. Your generosity and good taste are much appreciated.
Please share Solitaire - Ritual Ground again, Rho.
Hello, Rho:
I haven't been checking your blog since Christmas. Happy New Year to you and I hope you are doing well.
I would like to ask you to reupload this blog entrance about Steve Roach. I think this reupload follows the rules.
Also, I have just sent you an email. Could you check your Inbox, please?
Best wishes from
The Spaniard.
Hello again, Rho:
Thank you for reuploading the albums. Steve Roach is such a talented musician. I really enjoy listening to him and reading the descriptions you write in your posts.
Thanks and I hope you have a great weekend.
T.S.
Rho,
Any way to get reuploads on these? I've loved the recent Steve Roach posts.
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