Steve Roach Quiet Musi

Originally released in the mid-'80s on cassette and later in a truncated 2-CD edition, This current complete edition of Quiet Music (The Original 3-Hour Collection) presents this landmark album series exactly as Roach envisioned it.
Quiet Music is a collection of pieces created between 1983 and 1986 in respect for silence. The gentle electronics of Roach's synthesizers mix with flute, electric piano and sounds of nature flowing like breath, enveloping the listener in a sustained, delicate, translucent atmosphere.
Much of this music began as a series of early-’80s recordings commissioned by healing-arts programs and later used for everything from personal meditation to birthing music. Today these pieces still stand as a cornerstone in body-work, yoga, and healing therapies.

Prolific ambient innovator Steve Roach teams with Ph.D. shamanic practitioner / musician Mark Seelig to create a long-form piece of space-opening sound magic. Like the many fragrant and beautiful night-blooming plants which are host to mind-altering qualities, this 70-minute experience slowly blooms outwards with Mark’s vocal harmonic and Tuva-style overtoning intertwining within Steve’s zones and “terra” grooves. A slow motion magical blend is created in this nocturnal mist-filled realm. The power of the human voice is drawn forth in a primordial understanding and finds a perfect fusion with subterranean heartbeats, drones and zones swelling from the harmonic soil, gently urging the Nightblooming to increase its potency and allure…

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.

Since its release in 1988, Dreamtime Return has earned its reputation as a genuine classic. The two-CD magnum opus is one of the most important, widely known and highly respected release in Steve Roach’s vast body of work. It serves as an essential benchmark within the Electronic-Ethno-Atmospheric genre.
Roach’s travels in the Australian outback, along with studies of the Aboriginal Dreamtime, and his desert walkabouts in California were the lifeblood for this recording which even today sounds like a transmission from the near future and the very distant past.
Musically Dreamtime Return richly deserves its classic status, but Roach also deserves credit for leading electronic musicians out of their sheltered studios and into an active relationship with the landscape..

Steve Roach and Robert Rich are the most important electronic ambient musicians in the U.S. SoMa is their highly acclaimed follow-up to their first collaboration, Strata. Soma, according to Vedic writings, is "a drink made from plants which could help one commune with the gods." It is also the Greek word for body. So they designed this CD to be a vehicle to traverse between the physical and spiritual worlds. It is deep stuff. The soundscape offers listeners the opportunity to pursue and achieve states of ecstasy. The only extracurricular involvement is from the souls of the music and the listeners. The psychoactive atmospheres penetrate the defenses of the spirit and use Earth's resonant rhythms to tap into the biorhythms. From that point forward, Rich and Roach are in control. Listeners will go to the far reaches of the netherworld and stay within the limits set by this duo.

The second of two collaborations with Kevin Braheny inspired by the desert, this album pays homage to the Edward Abbey book of the same title. It inadvertently became a memorial to that Southwestern nature writer when Abbey died shortly after the music was recorded. Featuring some powerful work by Michael Stearns, this album taps into the psychological depths of stark Southwestern landscapes through a subtle set of soundscapes depicting the hidden dangers, unseen gifts, and intoxication that the desert promises.