Steve Roach

We are excited to present this soulful 30 year reunion between two stalwarts of Ambient-Electronic music in its entirety, exactly as it occurred. Steve and Robert answered the urge for unification after a very long orbit and 40 year friendship, reuniting and engaging their collective creative process, fueled with decades of individual innovations, genre defining releases and worldwide concerts.

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.

Western Spaces is a collaborative album by the American ambient musicians Steve Roach, Kevin Braheny and Richard Burmer. This album is the first of Steve Roach’s many musical tributes to the Southwestern Desert. This recording conjures up the desert vistas and the vast stark beauty of the American southwest through a collection of pieces that play like a soundtrack to a road trip through the Mojave Desert, Death Valley and Joshua Tree, California. All of these locales were the inspiration for the musicians during the creation of the music.

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.

Magnificent, majestic and voluminous truly describes the expansive sonic experience spanning this 140-minute 2-CD set. The Sky Opens represents a sublime moment in the evolution of Steve’s 40-year history within the ambient/electronic genre. His sound manifests through an artistic process of real-time engaged interaction where his vision is channeled through a blend of technology, composition and improvisation, all captured in the moment of creation. This transpires for Steve in the studio as well as in live settings where mostly hardware instruments bring his studio environment to the stage.

Emotions quietly stir and resonate in this deeply self-reflective album exploring the terrain between melodic electronic/ambient and modern minimalism. These six pieces utilize gentle melody, harmony and sonic tonality to poignantly reflect upon the passage of time, life lived, lives passed and a time of renewal: a sigh of the ages expressed in sound.
Sigh of Ages is the result of extended periods of solitude and personal reflection for acclaimed composer Roach. Resulting directly from dynamic personal and cultural events, these pieces developed over time and in the moment. After 10 months of early morning and late night sonic meditations, Roach collected these various pieces and found they portrayed a poetic theme of sonic interpretations from this experience…

This long-form zone billows out like a big sigh from the dawn of time, breathing steady and strong. Minimal and infinite in its essence, like all of Steve's long-form zones this is a functional soundworld specifically created to enhance the atmosphere of your personal sanctuary, your living environment and beyond. Lower volume playback increases the potency. This sound space serves as a kind of portal to states of subtle awareness, and is perfect for the support of deeper sleeping as well.

After the stillness comes the Afterlight. Created in the Spring of 2009, in the afterglow of Dynamic Stillness, this long-form piece delivers the listener deep inside a multi-dimensional realm of forming clouds, an endless expanse with no boundaries or sense of temporal limits. Amorphous strands of harmonic lumina emerge and recede in a constant unfolding and reconfiguring state for the duration of this pure atmospheric suspension. This piece, along with its two companion releases Destinations Beyond and Immersion Four were created over the the same time period, and all share a common sense of breath, interconnection and pursuit of timelessness. Refined over several months, the piece was kept in constant low-volume playback during sleep, rest and times of reflection. The ongoing experience of living with the piece, and shaping it before its release into the world, has become a vital part of Steve's immersion process, going back to 1984's Structures from Silence.

Steve Roach and Robert Rich are two of the strongest e-musicians ever - musically, spiritually, and emotionally. But their greatest strengths are their abilities to express themselves musically and to interact cohesively. Rich and Roach approach music from almost completely divergent angles. Roach is always right in the middle of things, searching for answers to his questions. Rich, on the other hand, spends a great deal of time in the setup before diving into the middle. Once there, he begins searching for questions to his answers. Together, these approaches complement each other and they get right down to it. This CD consists of four very personal statements. It is personal to the composers, individually and as a duo, and to deep listeners…