Steve Roach: Trance Archeology (CD)

Reviews

1. 

   padmin – February 8, 2021

   From Darkroom Magazine

   Torniamo alla fine del 2019 per parlare di una delle tantissime uscite di Steve Roach, ormai attestatosi intorno alle 4 o 5 pubblicazioni annue. Il compositore americano continua anche in questo Trance Archeology ad esplorare i meandri dell’ambient music, aprendo porte che portano alla space-ambient, ma anche ad una certa psichedelia di marca elettronica, così come verso universi riflessivi cari alla new age, ambito sempre più amato da Roach. Gli otto brani del disco appaiono morbidi e tendono a cullare l’ascoltatore attraverso un viaggio psichico sterminato, tra drones, tappeti semi-sinfonici e armonie perpetue. Vengono inserite ad hoc anche partiture tribali (“Spawn Of Time”, “Birthpulse”, “Firebreather”), piacevole elemento aggiunto ad un impianto che, sebbene impeccabile, non lascia mai sorpresi. Come da protocollo i suoni di Roach rendono al massimo in associazioni visive o come sottofondo, e anche da questo punto di vista “Trance…” non fa eccezioni, suggerendo panorami astrali al limite dell’effetto lisergico, inducendo in stato ipnotico e aprendo la via a spunti onirici. Album perfettamente in linea con la qualità compositiva e tecnica cui ci ha abituato questo autore, senza comunque apparire superiore o più ispirato rispetto ad altri lavori che Roach ha rilasciato in tempi recenti. Edito in un classico digipak a 4 pannelli. Rating: 7 -Michele Viali

2. 

   padmin – June 2, 2020

   From Richard Gurtler

   Languidly meandering cyber-tech glitters serenely arise, while remote synthetic tribal beats tenaciously gallop towards vigorously animated, mesmerizingly opiated, blossomingly intriguing and subterraneanly enthralling sonic palette. Spellbindingly expansive nocturnal vistas continuously commingle with euphoniously embracing narrative glimmers. Ear-tickling high-end meridians exquisitely illuminate heart-warmingly graceful and profoundly traversing horizons. Nebulously immense, sonorously infinite and solitarily engulfing sceneries impeccably juxtapose with soulfully vivacious, perpetually cadenced and hypnotically mindscaping pulses. Piquantly radiant vortexes collide with galvanizingly animated tapestries. Hypogeally enigmatic zones are inconspicuously invaded by meditatively intangible strokes, while guarded by eternal tides of intensely evocative arid solitudes.

   74-minute Trance Archeology, packaged in a 4-panel digipak, is out since November 1st, 2019 on Projekt. Will Merkle and Robert Logan as guest artists, Howard Givens as mastering virtuoso and Sam Rosenthal as the cover design wizard complete the spirited tribe on this all-inclusive aural and visual tour de force. A splendiferous oasis of artistic ingenuity, passion and visionary, where Steve Roach meticulously amalgamates state-of-the-art cybertronics with shamanic primordial reminiscences and genuinely simmering sonoranscapes. Connect to the genius loci of the Timehouse, a true milestone indeed!!! On top of this, Trance Archeology is also available as a T-shirt, tote bag and poster. Don’t even try to ask me if I have them all… -Richard Gürtler (May 27, 2020, Bratislava, Slovakia)

3. 

   padmin – January 7, 2020

   Riding the airwaves on the best Tucson albums of 2019
   Jeff Gardner, Tucson Local Media Dec 25, 2019

   There are a lot of words to describe Tucson, but boring sure isn’t one of them. For a comparatively small city, there seems to be art bursting out of every crevice and cactus. Picking my favorite albums to come out of Tucson this year was difficult enough, keeping track of all of them is downright impossible. But inevitably, a handful catch my ear. Here are my favorite music releases to come out of Tucson in 2019.

   Steve Roach is one of the rare artists where I have to decide which album he released in 2019 is my favorite. Trance Archeology wins out because it is a vast, hypnotic world that expertly blends the various styles he’s perfected over his career: the desert ambience, the ascending sequenced electronics, the dark drones, the mysterious tribal rhythms. The title is the perfect hint for what this album sounds like: both electronic and stone. Lay in the dark and listen to this, I dare you to not feel something massive, to not be transported to some alien land at night. There’s something deep in Trance Archeology I haven’t even begun to understand.

4. 

   padmin – January 6, 2020

   From The Big City

   Steve Roach’s entire career of music making has revolved around two general poles: generative music and pattern-based music. The former coalesces through time out of tendrils of sound, like the way gravity draws gas together in space until the resultant mass ignites into a star, while the latter is music that comes out of sequencers, building and layering patterns into textures that transform as they amble along. The great example of his generative music is the classic Structures from Silence, while my favorite of his pattern music albums is Skeleton Keys, a great album.

   Two 2019 releases from Roach mix these ideas. Bloom Ascension is sequenced throughout, while Trance Archeology takes an arch shape that gradually generates itself into patterns that eventually drift away. Of these two, I find Bloom Ascension the most satisfying, every moment is one that leads me to the next, and the result is the kind of cleansing experience that Roach strives for. There are moments of this as well in Trance Archeology, but there is also a gap between the quality of the generative washes of sound, which are standard but not exceptional, and the patterns that start to build once the album reaches its title track.

   Roach is prolific (making music is as much a daily personal practice for him as it is the idea of creating something to present to others, you can read more about his thoughts in this interview I did with him for Bandcamp)—and at least to my listening his pattern-based explorations have been the most consistently successful over the last five years. He’s just set up his own Bandcamp page where you can subscribe to his output, and that’s sure to deliver a lot of music.

5. 

   padmin – November 19, 2019

   From Prog Archives

   Along with a year full of fruitful collaborations and exceptional live performances, the best arrives from American prog- electronic/ambient pioneer Steve Roach with Trance Archaeology, and what an evocative title that proves to be. The name alone hints at a fusion of earthy old-world sounds and machine-future sleekness, and this November 2019 solo set from the icon presents a continuous seventy-four minute suite of kaleidoscopic sound-collages that still retain Roach’s ever-present humanity, where frequent rhythmic elements fused to their core are blurred into ever-evolving oblivion, with the whole making for a deeply hallucinogenic aural dreamworld.

   `Spawn Of Time’ is an unhurried psychedelic drift, all creaking, gurgling and groaning synths around rising/falling trickles over drowsy ambient drones. When gentle tribal beats begin to enter, they’re distorted into other-worldly mystery, with a cool machine iciness fused to ancient earthen textures, and there’s a brooding unease rippling throughout this opening seventeen- minute passage. The wondrous `Indigo Moon’ is a very special moment – languorous guitar chimes and ruminative piano musings hold a very crystalline and freed quality, and it’s rare to hear Steve approach these instruments in such a way.

   `Trance Genealogy’ may initially be grounded in sparkling electronic fizzes and delicately bouncing Berlin School-flavoured sequencer patterns, but its soothing New-Age caresses ultimately prove uplifting with an intimate fragility. After the `Sigh of Ages’-like `Long Shadow’, the cavernous `Birthpulse’ relentlessly slinks with murky morphing grooves and cavernous inhaling/exhaling ambient breaths. Former Roach collaborator Robert Logan enters here and contributes various enhancements, enough to subtly twist the disc even further into the alien-like textures that pervaded their 2016 `Biosonic’ team-up, and he helps make `Firebreather’ ripple with flinching tribal twitches and turn `Unearthed’ sludgy and lurching. Closer `Soul Archaeology’ is blissful with lulling and soothing ambient veils sweeping across the listener in the most delicate and soothing manner.

   For seasoned Roach fans, or for those who like to see ambient/prog-electronic works taken to their artistic peaks, the disc is endlessly immersive and achingly beautiful, being one of his most colourful and diverse releases of recent times. Trance Archaeology showcases the artist achieving a truly seamless fusion of vintage and modern styles that make up his various musical personalities today, and makes for surreal, uneasy and darkly addictive listening with constant moments of pristine beauty.

   Four and a half stars. -Aussie-Byrd-Brother

6. 

   padmin – November 15, 2019

   From Echoes

   Steve Roach’s Bloom Ascension & Trance Archeology Review
   Steve Roach has always worked in phases. There was his early, Berlin School phase, the techno-tribal phase which launched with Dreamtime Return, the drone zone phase, which is always happening with Roach and now, the analog sequencer dervish phase. Since his 2015 CD of the Month, Skeleton Keys, Roach has been going back to modular synths in deeper way than he ever did in the 1980s. The results, heard on Bloom Ascension, have been a music driven by spiraling sequencer patterns that evolve and mutate across a large expanse of time, although for Roach, these are relatively short pieces. He’s evolving from Skeleton Key’s ringing non-keyboard approach, using sweeping synth chords that swell in spectral orchestras throughout tracks like “The Beauty Relentless”.

   Of course, no sooner did we pick this as a bonus CD, than Roach drops yet another album, Trance Archeology. It’s his third in 2019, after eight releases in 2018.

   Trance Archeology finds Roach returning to his techno-tribal sound with acoustically percussive rhythms and strange but organically morphing sound effects of creaks and ratchets. “Spawn of Time” lives up to its foreboding title in a ritual dance through the underworld. “Indigo Moon” is a meditative expanse by comparison as pristine timbres shimmer through water-drop focus. “Long Shadow” takes that approach deeper and darker in one of Roach’s deeply evolving drone zone works.

   But the most interesting tracks may be the “Trance Genealogy” which seems to merge his analog modular and sequencer driven sound with a more organic, but no less electronic sound design. In a way this may be the most varied of Roach’s latest albums. It’s not just sequencers on stun or drone zones to the abyss. Instead, he taps many veins of his music in the last three decades, creating individual tracks but in a coherent world.

   “Birthpulse” shares a techno-tribal lineage with “Spawn of Time” while “Firebreather” extends that sound into a menacing dervish of heavy percussion loops accented and laced by splotchy sounds like they were being squeezed out of a tube of toothpaste. Roach was never afraid to be scary in his music and this could be a score to a very dark horror film. -John Diliberto

7. 

   padmin – November 14, 2019

   From Magnetic Magazine

   “Trance Geneology” among THE 15 BEST AMBIENT & DOWNTEMPO TRACKS OF OCTOBER 2019

   Ambient and atmospheric mastermind, Steve Roach, delivered his album Trance Archaeology this month and this track is one of the more wondrous and glistening additions I was drawn to. Being almost 16 minutes long, you can just let this one play and let go. Echoing drones seem to blow with the wind and gentle melodic pads pulsate as if the sound is alive. Maybe it is. -Miko Ann

8. 

   padmin – November 1, 2019

   From Exposé

   One has to wonder, after so many years and so many releases, how does an artist like Steve Roach come up with new ideas that don’t sound like what he’s done before? Some reference points to past work will be there on each new album but I have to believe that a lot of experimentation goes on between each new body of work to germinate new ideas, textures, and concepts and bring them into a cohesive existence before they are used on any new releases. Such it seems to be with his latest offering, Trance Archeology, a collection of eight pieces of varying lengths that certainly seem at home within his typical ambient soundworld, but feature a number of new sounds and textures, many in the percussive and rhythmic realm that don’t recall any of his previous works, at least those that this reviewer can recall.

   The side-long opening track “Spawn of Time” features enough new textures and rhythms in its first five minutes to easily support this claim, most created or processed through his modular synths, but often organized rhythmically to vaguely resemble hand drums or such, with other-worldly sounds surrounding the listener like fertile swirling magic on a starlit night, with odd and often twisted sprites of color barreling out of the sky. Eighteen minutes later, after the steady percussive beat has fallen behind clouds of swirling motion, one senses a drop in the volume level and that something new is coming, as the second cut “Indigo Moon” merges seamlessly with it as the opener fades gently away. We are now in a world of shaded stillness that slowly immerses the listener, with a low, slow oscillating pulses supporting colorful bell sounds circling around the psyche.

   “Trance Genealogy” is another side-long adventure, this time beginning on a foundation of more typically Berlin School electronics, but with more than its share of soaring atmospherics as it progresses onwards. One won’t even notice when the track changes to “Long Shadow,” a mysterious, dreamlike, cavernous mystery that follows on from much of Roach’s more recent work. Deep pulses and of steady rhythm return on “Birthpulse” and are futher elaborated on “Firebreather” before mixing it up with a new wealth of electronics on “Unearthed.” Hardly a minute goes by anywhere where the foundational sounds aren’t constantly morphing, growing, and shifting as we go. Twelve minute closer “Soul Archeology” forms seamlessly from the previous cut, with subtly shaded sonic events peppering an expansive tranquil sonic panorama. There are plenty new explorations in Trance Archeology, but it remains unmistakably the pioneering work of Steve Roach. -Peter Thelen

9. 

   padmin – November 1, 2019

   From Star’s End

   Steve Roach often finds himself in the borderlands – exploring the edges of Electronic Music, and confirming that it is a genre much bigger than we ever imagined. His album Trance Archeology (73’56”) uses sound to conjure a powerful mood, and tells a story that only each individual listener will know. A mystical landscape of the mind this release provides a fascinating mix of the organic, the tech-tronic, and the irresistible pull of possibility. Although this music is without words, it clearly resonates with hidden voices. Across its eight tracks Trance Archeology goes from mystic incantations to twisting nerve sparks and roiling synthesizer textures. Electrical currents course through this work, as does blood through the body – the muted roar of its rushing textures ever present, but well beneath the surface. At certain points the sound field seems to deconstruct down to a granular realm – which bestows a digital slowing that sinks us back in time.

   Further in, the tribal viral grooves and pulsing patterns establishes, then moves us across an undiscovered terrain. In an interesting use of looping percussion samples under spacious reverberation and innovative treatments, Roach conceives distances as remote as the moon, and as deep as thought. Beyond this heat there are also thought zones where the feel becomes more settled, locating a less energetic and more reflective atmosphere. These shifts are part of the dynamic equilibrium that is Roach’s goal. Imagining and sounding its way into our minds Trance Archeology will be good for listeners, and even better for dreamers. Cut out against the void it digs to reveal turbulent states, and the temple of sound which is at the core of this musician. The silence that will follow is starkly different than the silence before this album began its spin – as we will then be in a much different space, and a much different peace. -Chuck van Zyl