It's not often you get duets in pure ambience, but synthesist Steve Roach has been working at it for a decade with Belgian synthesist Vidna Obmana (a.k.a. Dirk Serries). In 1999, they released a limited-edition, three-CD set of deep ambience called Ascension of Shadows. Now that box set is being broken up into its component parts and released as single discs. The first, Somewhere Else, drops you into the deep end with a single 72-minute composition. It's like riding a ghost ship where sounds are submerged, fittings and rigging rustle and bang, and pipe-organ chords hang distended and unmoored. It's abstract, but never dissonant or discordant. Cast in another time or a different environment, Somewhere Else would be considered avant-garde and plopped down next to Gyorgy Ligeti's "Atmospheres" or Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Telemusik." As with a lot of Roach's music, there are no melodies or rhythms to grab onto. Instead, you just drift into the sound world, exulting when an apparent crescendo emerges 51 minutes in. -John Diliberto

[This review is for the original 3-cd set] This beautifully presented multi-disc set, packaged in a cloth black box, represents some of Roach and Vidna Obmana's most introspective and immersive recordings in years. Drones wrenched out of some nameless void cruise slowly through great vacuums of space, the only intrusion coming from stark, unearthly tones that sometimes grow, sometimes recede, into the ebony background. Using a vast array of sound and signal processors, synths and a number of acoustic noise-makers, Roach and Vidna Obmana may very well be the acknowledged masters of "anti"-ambient music, music that emerges from the shadows, often erupting out of the blackness, in your face and probing, but simultaneously willing to nestle comfortably in the darkness. These are sounds that might seem to be nearly imperceptible until they suddenly grab the surrounding environment in their awe-inspiring, immense grip. Inner space music with a definable edge. - Darren Bergstein