A fine musical shower mutes in a strange tribal droning on Nada Terma opening. The second musical project of Arizonians Steve Roach and Byron Metcalf as well as of the German Mark Seelig, is a long introspective musical journey. A hypnotic journey, where Roach’s drones are smothered among Seelig ancestral aboriginal instruments. The first 3 movements are of a peace of mind from a fanciful desert to sonorous sound incantations which blow as the warm winds of Arizona aridities as any terrestrial deserts. A musical fluid which floods our internal creativity and made us traveling, on camels back, towards the spiritual dunes of a whimsical desert. A soft atonal, but musical movement, which livens up on Metcalf’s percussions on the 4th part. Beautiful percussions which modify the spiritual idleness towards a more dandling movement. Captivating, the rhythm sets ablaze the musical fluidity which grows rich on Dilruba strings and Roach threatening droning. Slowly, the movement embraces a strange lascivious dance by which the pace cadence increases appreciably under Roach’s ceaseless reverberations. Resonances which give the way to flutey breaths at the 6th part opening, returning Nada Terma in territories even more subjecting where flutes and percussions takes on a hypnotic incantatory harmony. The movement becomes heavier and percussions more incisive, cutting with the cyclic curvatures of the reverberations. The 7th part pursues these exotic dances of the senses where the drones of Roach blow such as desert winds rob the mountain relief, returning the conclusion of Nada Terma to its point of origin. Nada Terma is a beautiful music for those who like traveling with their dreams. Wandering without moving to the quest of a spiritual introspection, appropriate for its own perception. An excellent music for meditating, although from part 4th the rhythm is more animated but prevents by no means the search for its Mantra …for those who believe in it.

Nada Terma is a rich, exotic and mysterious eastern tinged ambient ride that brings together ethic percussionist Byron Metcalf, Bansuri flutist and Dilruba player Mark Seelig and ambient explorer Steve Roach.

The is album split into 7 tracks, but like the best ambient this works best as one long and continuous flowing 70 plus minute trip into heady & hypnotic sonic desert of sound. The first few tracks are dreamy, lush and mysterious yet building with heady eastern tinged synth expanses mixing in with the Dilruba’s hovers and drones, And the Bansuri Flutes haunting ancient & heady voice. With the sound slipping out of your speakers like heady incense smoke that soothes and loosen ones body and mind. By the 3rd track the trio’s harmonic overtone vocals( which are akin to mysterious eastern throat singing) are added to the mix, and by this point you really feel like your drifting over a vast and ancient deserts towards a golden and mysterious light sources. Then the eastern percussive elements enter on track four; slowly and tentative at first but slowly and surely they build up their depth and mix of clarity, but they never detract from the atmosphere built up before - instead heighten the eastern and mysterious air. As we move into track five the focus becomes on the hypnotic and interlocking eastern percussive tones unlined by the emission of eastern drone matter and almost electrified Dilruba detail and harmonic shimmer. By track six the Bansuri Flutes call archers out graceful and haunted notation once more & track seven starts to slow in percussive depth and presence as the eastern ambience drifts in once more.

An interesting and rewarding pairing of these three highly talented mood makers,which stays true to creating a mysterious and heady eastern atmosphere with neither of the three’s egos every getting in the way at any time across the albums 70 minute sonic journey. Roger Batty - Rating: 3 out of 5

This release from 2008 features 73 minutes of extreme ambience in a shamanistic vein.

Metcalf plays frame drums, earth drum, udu, clay pot, seed pods, and harmonic-overtone voice. Seelig plays bansuri flute, dilruba, and harmonic-overtone voice. Roach contributes drones, zones and atmospheres.

Moody textures generate a reverent mien of the type that stretch a moment into an eternity, but that stasis is embellished with haunting airs that rise from the murky pool of sound like antediluvian spirits who have come to impart cosmic wisdom through their august presence. Exotic strings flavor the accumulating mists with a taste of melancholic human aspirations, which periodically becomes subdued by the tonal divinity of an expansive void that remains a constant foundation throughout the composition.

Vaporous flutes wander through the seething tonalities, conjuring wistful emotions to the surface of the listener's mind. The psychic heart aches from their softly passionate refrain.

When the primitive percussives make their appearance, their beats are languid and studied, designed to ground any straying focus and goad it into a primal state of consciousness. These tempos never quite achieve a tribal mode, remaining pensive and churning thoughts into a passive sine wave, abetting receptivity to mysteries held fast in the mental depths. Shakers (i.e.: seed pods) introduce an expectant agitation to the music's ceremonial motif. An electronic presence lends a growling undercurrent that enhances this numinous quest.

While primarily ethereal in definition, the undulant threads provide ample substance, transforming this ambient excursion into a vibrant sonic experience.

“Nada Terma” is the second collaborative effort between Byron Metcalf, Mark Selig & Steve Roach after their successful album “Mantram” (2006). “Nada Terma” (meaning: the world of sounds reveals spiritual treasures) is a continuous 73-minute voyage split in seven segments, venturing into deeper mysterious lands, in which elements of world- ambient- and meditative music meet. Minimal in nature, various trance percussion, immersive, slow drifting dronescapes, Indian Dilruba and occasional overtone singing blend in a sonic pool that breaths both contemplation and mysticism. At times, the quiet, slowly whirling soundscapes could even be an instrumental interlude from a Loreena McKennitt or Peter Gabriel album.

All in all, “Nada Terma” is an organic work for deep listening and relaxation, dwelling in spirals of spiritual/mystic realms. - Bert Strolenberg

The mutual sensation of having found a kindred spirit may have played a part in this now over a decade long creative partnership. Just like Roach's, Metcalf's childhood was mainly spent living with and inside of music after having seen The Gene Krupa Story twice in a row as a little boy. Both, too, share an interest in expanded states of awareness and of facilitating access to them through music. Just like sounds take on an unusual plasticity and deeper meaning in Roach's oeuvre, drumming, for Metcalf, is a tool of changing a listener's perception and of making him susceptible to experiences that lie hidden beneath the surface or far beyond his regular horizon. While Roach-epics like the essentially open-ended works of the Immersion-series have dealt with hypnagogue states of both extreme calm and concentration, Metcalf aims at activating potentials through movement. As he has pointed out, the quality of his percussive work relies on the fact that steady, monotonous pulses at 220 beats per minute will, after a quarter of an hour at most, begin to shift the listener's brainwaves into the theta-levels associated with trance and dream. In combining the unfathomable depth of Roach's multifarious sound layers and the hypnotic potential of Metcalf's shamanic grooves, the music attains an irresistible pull and a stimulating power, which is strangely at odds with many outsider's perception of ambient as a genre aimed at relaxation and comfort zones.

It is a potential further increased and expanded upon on two recent releases with befriended musicians, both of which highlight entirely different aspects of their collaboration and demonstrate the kind of flexibility it allows for. Last year's Dream Tracker marks their first musical encounter with Dashmesh Khalsa, whose talents as a tabla-virtuoso and didgeridoo-player on his solo debut Fusion have already raised the interest of Bill Laswell. With Khalsa aged twenty-two, this is clearly not just a meeting between like-minded colleagues, but an intergenerational exchange as well. His youthful energy and enthusiasm certainly seem to have colored off on Dream Tracker, which contains comparatively to-the-point pieces around the ten-minute-mark (miniatures in the world of Roach and Metcalf), all but unanimously radiating optimism, confidence and a general mood of departure and expectation. It is also one of the most diverse collections any of these musicians has ever been a part of, ranging from the luminous drift of „Dreamtime Alchemy“, propelled forward by Mercalf's frame drums like a sailboat on a summer breeze horizon, to the melodic bliss of „From the Inside“ and the majestic trod of „Thunder Walk“.

The contrast with Nada Terma could hardly be more striking. Here, Khalsa is replaced with practising psychiatrist and shaman Mark Seelig, another long-term companion, with whom Roach first established contact in 2003. Not only does Seelig add different colours to the equation by contributing flute- and dilruba-lines and overtone singing. His participation also shifts the music into darker, more mystical territory, into a realm of inwardness, reflection and infinite, borderless space. Eschewing Dream Tracker's clearly delineated pieces, all of which work on their own, Nada Terma has rightly been described by the participants as a „continuous flow in seven parts“, with each movement feeding from and building on the other as the musicians carve out a single mood in ever more detail and relief. The patience and serenity on display here is remarkable - Metcalf doesn't even come in before the twenty-minute mark. Once he's in, though, he doesn't stop playing for a full fifty minutes, constantly varying his rhythms, conducting the ensemble from the front and leading the music through movements of slow-grooving sensuality and all-but complete standstill. There is an undeniably sacred mood to these time-suspending procedures, all of which are underpinned by Roach's „drones, zones and atmospheres“, continually changing in timbre and tone, yet forever remaining in the sun-tone of c, thereby creating the impression of witnessing a ritual, a passage intended to lead one straight into an altered mode of perception.

The differences in composition are a direct result of the differences in interaction: While Dream Tracker was originally supposed to remain a Metcalf solo work and only later fleshed out, Nada Terma was conceptualised as a group work at an earlier stage of the process, when Roach was invited on board by Metcalf and Seelig. What one quickly realises is that the trio have conceptualised their journey similar to a live set and the way a jazz band might approach an album session: There are solos, duos and trios. Buildups, climaxes and breakdowns. Moments of improvisation, compositional rigour and completely weightless drift. Passages of dense group performance and sequences, where each of the individual members is free to explore concepts of his own, only to lapse back into the fold. The notion of immediate, spontaneous human interaction resulting in a music as atmospherically tight and otherworldly as this adds an element of suspense and excitement to the unfolding: A single careless note could rupture the peaceful surface of this still ocean of sound.

As much as careful planning can benefit a recording, the process of collective creation can yield results inaccessible to the solo performer. Steve Roach and Byron Metcalf have widely used both – and turned their collaboration into a shared platform for achieving deeply individual goals with ever more precision. -Tobias Fischer