After dark descents into the abyss on The Magnificent Void and Midnight Moon, Steve Roach lightens up the textures a bit on the double CD Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces. The mood harkens back to his influential 1984 release, Structures From Silence, but the atmospheres are more textured and layered while melody is virtually non-existent. And while Structures had a slow motion pulse, Mystic Chords hangs rhythm free. It floats in a space of richly detailed, but minutely shifting sound constructs that owe more to Gyorgy Ligeti and Mark Rothko than early Roach touchstones like Klaus Schulze and Salvador Dali. Roach is creating a free fall through space, less rooted in the pulsing techno-tribal sound of his 1990s music, and more ecstatic in its evocations of something beyond. He carries you to groaning turgid depths, then lifts you as electric guitar glides and synthesizers gurgle, shudder, and swell in an Aurora Borealis of sound. - John Diliberto

I cannot see how Roach can ever hope to top this tour de force, magnum opus of ambient mastery. From the peaceful depths of his Quiet Music, to the gentle whispers of Structures from Silence, across the metaphysical fields of Dreamtime Return, and whirling about the gelid event horizons of the Magnificent Void's utter emptiness -- comes forth this splendid aural confirmation that Steve Roach is the absolute master of ambience. This release renewed my faith that Roach still had it in him to produce a signature massive imprint of deep listening excellence.

You will find some environmentally calming Mother Nature moments as in Quiet Music but Roach doesn't overdo it. It is just right -- as Eno might say, "sounds to be in and not listened to . . ." There is that sense of relaxing immensity that overflows the listener's psyche as Structures . . . produced. The cosmic timelessness yet earthly antiquities and resultant trance sense as created in Dreamtime . . . pervades. That chilling realization arises in places, of humanity's mark being so ephemeral and insignificant, a point of light floating in endless oceans of time and onion layers of reality which Roach's . . . Void buried us all in, that sends sporadic shivers up one's spine. Yet overall, Roach successfully intertwines a womblike warmth of being "known and kept" by the "Creator". How any logical person can blindly look about the cosmos and deny Design and Thought, I cannot fathom. The subjective peace this reviewer experiences in these compositions of Roach is akin to a belonging, an unseen protection, and an infinity of promises and destinies as yet unrevealed to flesh and blood. Spirit eternal is inside Roach's compositions. That personal sense of one's well-fleshed and mortal temporality is evident yet our spirit-fired exuberance in a God-given immortality is strongly echoed.

Roach's epic vision in his Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces boxed set is without a doubt, a landmark release that has raised the bar nearly to the stars for all ambient works to come. Bravo, Steve, bravo! And mostly, thank you so much for the experience. Highest of this editor's recommendations. - John W. Patterson, EER-MUSIC.com

To call Steve Roach’s new 4-CD set “ambitious” is an understatement. In Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces, Roach has given us more than two years’ worth of work, actually originating from ideas he first worked with in 1996. Mystic Chords lasts more than 5 hours if played straight through. That’s as long as a full-length Wagner opera, but mercifully without the singing. Indeed, this might be called the “Parsifal” of electronic music: a long, mythic journey into a world filled with esoteric light and spiritual passion.

To enter into the world of Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces, you must first understand its language and its culture. Roach’s music grows from many musical roots; he has taken inspiration from rock, jazz, electronica, “world” and aboriginal music, even “Western” cowboy music. But here, Roach’ s musical world is that of what is called “classical” music, or rather, the “serious” music of the late 19th and early to middle 20th century. For Mystic Chords he has chosen to use mostly notes and harmonies which can be found in the work of composers like the late Romantics of Europe and Russia, and the French “Impressionists” as well as more recent composers such as Aaron Copland and even the French avant-garde composer Olivier Messiaen. Most important for Roach’s Mystic Chords is the exotic music of the late 19th century Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, who created a huge “mystical universal chord” on which he based many wild works.

This album could very well be thought of as “classical music,” though Roach is using electronic media rather than an orchestra to do it. Yet it is still essentially “ambient,” and it uses the musical language of “ambient,” with its floating harmonies, its lack of rhythm, and its dreamlike slowness. For this set, Roach has put aside the aboriginal percussion that has been so characteristic of his work (except for one moment of rattle sounds at the beginning of disc 3). He has also left behind the insistent electronic rhythms of his earlier albums, as well as bells, chanting, special sound-effects, didgeridoo, ominous whispers, weird flutes, industrial clanks, and other familiar Roach features. What is left is pure harmony, played on layers and layers of synthesizers (and in places, modified electric guitar) which sometimes sound like an orchestra, sometimes like a great pipe organ. Only one track has an “acoustic” instrument, on Disc 1, where a cello is played as a drone.

On Disc 1, auto-titled “Mystic Chords and Sacred Spaces,” Roach sets all this out for the listener: the floating chords, the underlying drones, the oceanic reverberation, and above all, the harmonies. Everything depends on the harmonies that make up the chords: major, minor, modal, dissonant, consonant. Other ambient composers have tried this, and have produced hours of boredom. But Steve Roach can make transcendent music out of this style. The reason for Roach’s success is his outstanding musicianship and composing ability. He knows just what chord to use to evoke any emotion, whether happy, sad, warm, ominous, blissful or despairing. And these chords are not just simple guitar changes or plinks on a keyboard. They are highly complex tone-clusters, deliberately built up in each separate musical section from different keys and modes, and blended together with modern digital and sound-looping technology. One reason they are so effective, and unique to Roach, is that the notes in these chords are unusually spaced; a single chord may have notes that are two octaves apart, giving it a “vast” and open quality. Yet most of these chords can be played on a conventional piano or organ keyboard.

Enough musical analysis. I was not joking when I compared this to Wagner. Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces can be considered a kind of music drama in four acts. Disc 1, “Act 1,” sets forth a kind of grand musical uncertainty, a question; the mood in this first set is wistful, sometimes plaintive, and wondering. The listener is drawn in to the highly personal, yet universal story of a soul on a journey.

Disc 2, titled “Labyrinth,” opens with the idyllic “Wren and Raven,” which incorporates nature sounds, recorded real-time at Steve’s house. The sound of many birds, including not only a wren but a cheerfully tweeting house finch, are paired with somewhat unnerving synthesizer drones. As the set progresses, the nature sounds become more and more filtered and remote, and the synthesizers come into the foreground. It’s a chilling passage which depicts the transition from the natural world of birds and sunlight to the deep and often terrifying “Otherworld“ (the title of disc 2, track 2). This disc, “act 2,” is a dramatic expression of that otherworld journey, as Roach and so many other shamanic and inner travelers have experienced it. Disc 2 features the scariest, and most dissonant, music on the album. It also contains some of the most exalted and passionate sounds - swells of yearning and dark sinks of despair, all of them portrayed just by the harmonies, moving along in their stately slow rhythm of change. Later on Disc 2, the harmonies change again, in a fascinating mix of tonal (playable on “normal” keyboards) and microtonal sounds. Track 11, “Soulwave,” is the artistic climax of Disc 2, where pure vast vistas of starlit desert space emerge out of murky microtonal mist. It’s like looking out into the vastness of space and finding that you and the distant galaxies are on the same wavelength, resonating to a gorgeous, multi-level synthesizer chord. Disc 2, which had started in Steve Roach’s backyard, ends in sparkling, galactic bliss. But we are in no way done with the journey.

Disc 3, “Recent Future,” is in my opinion the best one of the four. It has the most varied and inventive music, and the widest diversity of mood and musical narrative. Here some of Roach’s titles edge towards the “New Age” (“Open Heart,” “Turn to Light,”) but this is hardly the twaddle which is still emitted by “new age” players. Rapturous shimmering tone-clusters, which sound almost like organ music, establish Disc 3 as a direct ray pointing into mystical consciousness, rising above any specific religious or cultural context. Interestingly, Roach reprises a chord from his frenetic Core (2001) in one of these serene, contemplative passages, in Track 4, “This Moment is a Memory.” The next track, “This Moment is Another Memory,” is also filled with un-mystical bent guitar notes and weird creature noises. Perhaps these are musical memories of previous Roach albums! The middle tracks on “Recent Future” return to the mystical mood and get smoother and softer, until they drift off to a quiet, minimalist sonic sleep in tracks 8, 9, and 10. Track 11, “Grounding Place,” sings not of sleep and bliss, but of melancholy and sadness, which even mystics cannot escape.

And then at the end of Disc 3, after the desolate “Grounding Place” fades out, come two tracks which I regard as the highest point not only of the disc, but the whole 4-disc set. Track 12, “Turning Back,” is a short but majestic “orchestral” tone-poem which closely resembles a quiet moment late in the first movement of American composer Aaron Copland’s “Symphony no. 3” (really! listen and you’ll agree!) which then leads into my favorite track of all of them (and favorite title, too), track 13, “The Spiral of Time’s Fire Burns On.” This is the pivotal and most intense piece of the whole set, where the meaning starts to emerge; it’s like the vision of enlightened fire, the goal which draws the mystic journeyer onward. Dazzling cascades and sequences of parallel 10th-chords build to a brilliant crescendo, echoing against each other in a glorious galactic cathedral sound. Yet, remarkably, it doesn’t end here. The photonic cathedral fades away, into a strange coda of murky, nocturnal, muffled dissonance. Even after the vision, the dark Otherworld, and the musical question, remains. There is one more “act” to go.

Disc 4, “act 4,” is titled “Piece of Infinity,” and it is all one 74-minute track. This extended ambient piece is along the lines of Roach’s other sound-environments, such as The Dream Circle, Slow Heat, or the more recent Darkest Before Dawn (which is derived from one of Roach’s “mystic chords” used on this album). Unlike the other three albums in this set, it is not meant for dramatic or narrative effect, but as an aural meditation or background to quiet contemplation. Musically, it is based on a slowly repeating arpeggiation of one of the basic “mystic chords,” slowly revolving upward over and over again. High, drifting synthesizer tones accompany this bassline, but do not intrude. It’s all much quieter in volume and in mood than the previous three albums. Here, the otherworld is left behind, and the journey is stilled. Is this the “answer” to Roach’s musical and spiritual question? If Roach were a lesser composer, he would just pick a sweet chord, relax, and flow downstream into smug prettiness. Disc 4’s music is comforting, but it’s also strange. This Infinity is not sweetness and light, and these slow orbits don’t provide an easy answer. The listener, and the journeyer, is left looking out into the darkness where despite all the memories of brilliance, the way is still unclear. - Hannah M.G. Shapero

This review presents me with a difficult challenge. I feel that I more than used up the superlatives in my vocabulary when I reviewed last year's Trance Spirits and Darkest Before Dawn. Though I like virtually all of Steve's output, I wasn't prepared for him to top himself quite so quickly and so thoroughly. At the risk of contradicting myself when I called Trance Spirits the best ambient CD ever (which I knew would come back to bite me, but not this soon), I will limit myself this time to saying this is easily one of Steve Roach' finest hours ~ well, 5 hours to be more precise. As an overview, Mystic Chords is what I would call the "classic" organic ambient style of Steve Roach; Labyrinth is his dark ambient style; Recent Future is a tasty variety sampler platter; and "Piece of Infinity" is one of Steve's trademark minimal long-form works, perhaps the subtlest and softest he has ever done. My favorite is the first disc, 5 tracks running from nearly 12 to just over 20 minutes each. There are great highs and lows, wonderful deep drones and high shimmering tones, all richly layered in an organic primordial soup that touches a vibrant nerve for a thoroughly soothing listening experience. Reaching deeper still is Labyrinth, 10 tracks that plunge deep into "The Otherworld," a track which is representative of the intense darkness found at several moments on disc two. Strange creatures call out from the caverns as we stand on the precipice looking down. With no looking back, we enter the even darker "Wonderworld." Gems are found in both long and short tracks, as evidenced by the beautiful "Threshold." "This small number takes on no small task, providing a smooth transition between the darkest and lightest selections on Labyrinth, and it most ably does so. After "Dream Body" and "Slowly Dissolveî"deceive us into thinking weíve found our way out, "Womb Of Nightî"tells us otherwise. Though undeniably Roach, I'm also reminded here of old haunting Schulze numbers from the early 1970s. We climb our way back out of the maze into disc three, Recent Future . It's still a little dark here, but not as much as its predecessor. Here Steve shows just how many subtleties can be brought to bear on this genre called ambient. In these 13 tracks, as on the rest of the discs, not a beat is heard, but the variety on this single disc while retaining a cohesive quality is remarkable. Light, dark, simple, complex, visceral, elegant ~ all are apt adjectives to describe the music to be found here. Sample to your heart's delight, or better yet, play it through from beginning to end and hear the flow as Steve intended. For that matter, I recommend doing that from "Palace of Nectar" all the way through to "Piece of Infinity." Consider it time very well spent. - Philip Derby

Steve wrote that the first ideas for this set came to life around 1996, and from that time was accomplished bit by bit, culminated in the first months of 2003 in nightly TimeRoom-sessions. The result is impressive: 4 cd’s which all clock over 70 minutes, in which deep-delving soundscapes lead the way. Disc 1 opens with profound and deep textures of the title track, slowly morphing and drifting off in vast and unknown territory. Disc 2 contains some sophisticated use of bird-sounds which merges perfectly with dissolving and deep moving-textures. This track really shows some elements of great works like The Magnificent Void and depth found in some of his former quiet recordings such as Structures from Silence. Disc 3 is another extensive journey into time and space with delicate use of environmentals here and there. Steve ’s magical soundsculpturing really surrounds the listener and makes you disappear towards the end. The set concludes with 1 longform composition without separate indexes, aptly called Piece of Infinity . Both deeply introspective and meditative in nature, this seems the ultimate core centre where things are initially born and return at the far end. A grand piece, great stuff for infinite playback like The Dream Circle or Atmospheric Conditions. All in all, Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces is an ultimate soundexperience in nowadays deep ambient, absolutely worth the wait and a great listening adventure! - Bert Strolenberg