Product Description
Skeleton Keys
1. The Only Way In 7:15
2. The Function Inside The Form 8:23
3. It’s All Connected 9:28
4. Outer Weave 5:12
5. Symmetry And Balance 9:35
6. Saturday Somewhere 10:50
7. Escher’s Dream Is Dreaming 9:48
8. A Subtle Twist Of Fate 13:24
total time 74:00
The Skeleton Collection
2005
1. The Skeleton Key
2. Climbing Escher’s Stairs
3. Fantastic Elastic
4. The Right Membrane
5. All Is Good
2015
6. Off the Spool
7. Something For Now
8. The Joy of Sequence
2. The Function Inside The Form 8:23
3. It’s All Connected 9:28
4. Outer Weave 5:12
5. Symmetry And Balance 9:35
6. Saturday Somewhere 10:50
7. Escher’s Dream Is Dreaming 9:48
8. A Subtle Twist Of Fate 13:24
total time 74:00
Three parts to the whole:Skeleton Keys CD — 8-tracks, 74-minutes.
|
This item is a CD 2-pack containing the Skeleton Keys & The Skeleton Collection
Steve Roach: Skeleton Keys
Experience the beauty of 100% pure analog modular sequencer-based music.
There’s a worldwide analog modular synthesizer resurgence in full swing. Pioneering electronic musician Steve Roach taps into the zeitgeist on Skeleton Keys, a 74-minute album recorded using the Synthesizers.com large format analog modular synthesizer/sequencer-based system. These are eight emotional and mind-expanding spiraling mandalas-of-sound made from interwoven tapestries of melody, rhythm, tone and musical space.
Steve Roach: Skeleton Keys
With the sense of an artist working in three dimensional space, Steve’s skill set creates an album that breathes power, passion and vital life energy. On Skeleton Keys Steve connects to the European EM masters at the roots of his electronic heritage while simultaneously mapping the soundworld of today’s contemporary technology-based music. The result is warm and engaging retro-futurism, a continuing evolution upon the musical structures Steve has unlocked in the restless pursuit of his soundquest.
Steve Roach: The Skeleton Collection 2005 – 2015
5 early analog-based pieces that planted the seeds for this project and 3 piece recorded after Skeleton Keys was complete. Steve says: After orbiting around this project for several years, I continued to return to the original 2005 recordings, still feeling the growing desire to explore the “essence of the sequence” direction.
Erik Wollo: Blue Radiance (CD)
As Lonely As Dave Bowman: Monolith (limited edition CD)
Reviews Editor –
Skeleton Keys is Echoes’ May 2015 CD of the Month!
From Echoes
As Steve Roach’s Skeleton Keys opens, with a reverse sequencer pattern fading-in as if going backwards in time, this quote struck me because Roach is returning to his analog synthesizer sequencer roots. But since Roach has been relentlessly discovering new music directions for 35 years, when he revisits these sounds, he hears it anew, discovering innovative pathways in an old vocabulary.
Steve Roach is a child of German space music. Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Ash Ra Tempel (sic) were his Holy Trinity and he expanded on that sound with albums like Now, Traveler and his definitive sequencer statement, Empetus. While many artists were content to stay in that mode, Roach crossed the border into a new world of sound, developing techno-tribal with Dreamtime Return, deep drone with Magnificent Void, and galactic expansion on albums like Arc of Passion. Elements of those 1980s sequencer pulses would return, radically shifted, on albums like Light Fantastic and Proof Positive, but they have been secondary or understated elements on the 50 or so solo albums Roach released since Empetus in 1986.
When “The Only Way In” opens the door to Skeleton Keys, a wash of familiarity rushes in, but it’s a sound that is also altered by a quarter century of musical evolution. There’s a more tribal, percussive approach to these analog-driven tracks that wasn’t present in 1986. The nature of Roach’s interwoven sequencer patterns has also changed. They’re more intricate and transformative, a fractal moiré pattern of shifting perspectives and deceptive depths. Roach slowly alters sequencer patterns in a track, changing focus, bringing one element into bas relief then re-submerging it into the pattern. It’s a fascinating display of electronic painting that reveals a minimalist element to this music that owes more to Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” than Tangerine Dream’s “Phaedra.”
This might be the only Roach album that displays its technology like a trophy. Roach composed Skeleton Keys on a massive analog synthesizer constructed in the style of early Moog modulars, with tons of switches, knobs and patch bays. An extreme close-up photo of a few knobs on the instrument graces the cover and a promotional postcard has Roach standing in front of it, the huge synthesizer spilling beyond the frame. A lot of artists are going in this direction these days, but few have the mastery and control that Steve Roach reveals.
Most of the compositions’ titles relate to Roach’s sonic structures. “Escher’s Dream Is Dreaming” features sequencer patterns that seem to turn on themselves, and “Symmetry and Balance” reflects interlocking notes that mirror, refract and move contrapuntally through time. “It’s All Connected” is both a philosophical construct and a commentary on Roach’s music: the piece is built upon a techno-tribal flow of acoustic sounding percussion, matched by a twanging, nattering electronic pattern, a marriage of his two dominant worlds.
Sonically and sensually, Skeleton Keys is as immersive as anything Steve Roach has recorded and is best heard loud on good speakers or headphones, as patterns bounce across the stereo spectrum in lysergic pirouettes. These Skeleton Keys will unlock your consciousness. -John Diliberto