Steve Roach makes music that moves outside of conventional time and space. As when small pebbles are tossed in a placid pond, his subtle changes have monumental effects, because the dynamics have been lowered and time stretched to the edge. That's why, at about the 23-minute mark of this 73-minute ambient opus, it's such a shock when a low growl--like slow-motion waves--breaks across the speakers. "Artifact Ghost," the only composition on Immersion: Two, is another of Roach's long-form works, harkening back to Structures from Silence but without even that album's distended melodic sway. As a gentle Twilight Zone-like siren sound wafts its way in the far distance, Roach does a slow dive into a music of deep viscosity. With sounds rustling like insects prattling in the eaves and the wind brushing branches against the window, "Artifact Ghost" will either scare you out of your pants or take you out of your body. On Immersion: Two, Steve Roach continues to make a rarefied sound as the Mark Rothko of electronic music. -John Diliberto

Immersion: two finds Steve Roach investigating a darker and stranger long form ambient sound world, than the first Immersion disk. Moulding and sculpting out some really very eerier and edgy nocturnal moodscapes, that have a mysterious harmonic charm, which seem to suck you in further and further to it’s slow moving dark world.

The feeling for this 70+ minute long trip is akin to floating slowly over a nightime forest, the trees just swaying with a slight breeze. Up above a starless sky hovers cloud bound,ominous chilled light coming from the bone white moon as it appears ever so often though the clouds thick mask. Or maybe a slow descent into cooling cave system that trickles and echoes with strange watery sounds. You feel like you’ve been walking for ages, your feet finally give up and leaving you slouched against the cave wall look out on to slowly tickly underground waterfall that’s lit by your fading touch light, that soon fades altogether leaveing you in velvet enveloping darkness. Roach very successively builds up slow shifting clouds of droning and earth sighing electronic tones and bitch black harmonics, with all manner of drippings and night breezy rushes, making this one dark sound trip you won’t want to take your ears off.

Amazingly Roach has managed to top the high standards of the first part. Making really a more involving and morphing darker flip side to part ones floating white light wonder. Rating: 4 out of 5 -Roger Batty

This release from 2006 offers 73 minutes of pure ambience. Representing the extreme opposite of the above CDs, this release offers a solid dose of ambience in its purest form. Tonalities unfurl with unflinching lassitude, unmarked by discernible variance. An atmosphere of constancy is achieved, moody and soothing, yet actually slowly mutating as it slides along a harmonic beam. Auxiliary textures surface with immense subtlety, merging with each other to form thicker resonance. Soft, almost hesitant noises appear, sparks illuminating the sparse environment with tender gurgling and synthetic rattling. The soundscape is breathing, but the cycles of contraction and expansion are so distended as to become inconspicuous changes in the even flow of ethereal substance. As the piece continues, however, these pulsations become more apparent as the music flexes with luxuriant demeanor. Darker elements begin to show up, as if the sighing soundscape has entered a region of higher density that produces deeper echoes of the somber oscillation. Obviously, this recording is intended to provide the listener with a calming backdrop that promises to be unintrusive yet subtly engaging, affecting the subconscious by gently stroking the periphery of concentration.

Includes the inner cosmos: A sphere which leaks from the speakers into the room. Developments in electronic music in the late 20th century have introduced notable changes in musical formats. The „Song“ now competes with the „Track“, a solitary „Sound“ can constitute an entire „Score“ and the notion of a „Composition“ can be replaced with the idea of a „Zone“. On „immersion: two“, Steve Roach comes close to unifying the latter two terms into a single symbiotic entity with the potential of tearing these all too often superficial borders down for good.

He may well be just the right person for the job. When Roach started co-defining a genre which, in its first incarnation, had sprung from the quill and imagination of Brian Eno, he was regarded as a pioneer and his music as „progressive“ (whatever that is worth in the music business) – a stark contrast with the contemporary perception of Ambient as music for narcoleptics and Dark Ambient as lullabies for Gothics.

Obviously, Roach had the tremendous advantage of approaching the idea of Ambient from the viewpoint of an open-minded composer and trained musician , instead of from the angle of a sound artist. His ideology, if that word allows for enough freedom, seemed to lie in the recognition that there was a physical logic in the traditional and proven system of harmony, melody and structure and that art needed to take this into account to achieve the greatest effect – instead of replacing it exclusively with timbre.

He therefore aimed at skillfully wiping out all traces of his involvement in their creative process, his albums often appearing exercises in externalizing their composer – one can be sure that there is just as much surprise and astonishment on the side of the audience as there is with Roach himself upon hearing the final result. It is the very fact that the music always sounds as though it could be decoded, its rationale still seemingly within reach of our logic, which awards its impenetrability additional depth and keeps the mind working even when it has long surrendered to the textural aspect of a piece.

In this respect, the album at hand may well be the best example of this technique. Steve Roach, after all, immersed himself in these seventy-three minutes repeatedly for over a decade, experiencing it as an outsider, while continuing to work on its structure. The „track“ appeared as a backing to more rhythmic work, an eight-minute edit appeared on a collection of lost tracks and a looped version was used to get fans in the mood in anticipation of live appearances. "This continuous zone, titled 'Artifact Ghost', has to be one of my favorites for late-night activity and sleeping.“, Roach revealed in his notes to „immersion: two“, „For years I kept coming back to it, as it always feels alive and never-ending, never beginning.“

Some may find it narcissistic for an artist to appreciate his own work in this way, but in this case there is a mistaken argumentation behind that point of view. For a track like „Artifact Ghost“ to work, its compositional method can no longer just consist of placing notes on an imaginary scale. The composer really needs to live with the music as if it were part of his environment. Only if he, too, reacts and responds to the „Zone“ and starts using it for its intended purpose, can he be sure that it has fulfilled its purpose.

This care shows and turns these surreal chord progressions, which meet at intervals to rise up like flames, into a sphere which leaks from the speakers into the room, enveloping everything in an air of continous expectation and a nocturnal light. Something about this music reacts with the chemistry of the space around you – and turns it into an instantaneous installation right from the very first moment.

And yet, there is more. Paradoxically, on a long enough scale, some of the smallest events can be magnified by the lense of time. Here, too the inclusion of barely noticeable layers, sometimes merely playing softly alongside already existing patterns, keeps the listener guessing whether it's all just one gigantic repetition or an intricately planned and mapped-out effort. At around the 22-minute mark, a sweeping sound comes blowing over the soundscape like a hurricane, without ever fully brushing it aside. And in the final minutes, Roach cools „Artifact Ghost“ down to an almost static drone, existing solely as a memory of what preceeded it.

These parallel worlds of roomscape and composition can coexist on „immersion: two“, because it seems to draw its energy from both. Maybe it even needs the two of them to develop at all. As a listener, too, one can appreciate the music as a zone which one can keep coming back to while working or as a composition which allows the mind to wander freely. There's no need to define any new categories: This is still a dark kind of Ambient – if the spatial parameters of that term include one's inner cosmos as well. -Tobias Fischer