Steve Roach: AS IT IS (CD)

Reviews

1. 

   padmin – May 11, 2021

   From Ambient Blog

   Inspired by the German electronic scene (Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream) and Vangelis, Steve Roach bought his first synth when he was 20 and debuted in 1982 with his first album. He proved to be a very prolific artist: his discography now boasts more than 160 albums. His work has a distinctly recognizable sound: a lush, full production, often connected to the landscape where he lives (the Sonoran desert just outside Tucson, Arizona). Maybe we could even speak of a specific genre-sound which he shares with artists like Robert Rich, Jorge Reyes and Michael Stearns.

   As It Is is described as “a spacious album of organic analog electronic music with a breath and heartbeat – a simmering, churning, moving appointment with reality. A bold step deeper into the time- and space-altering realms Steve has pioneered over all these many decades”. With the exception of the 6:16″ track Tears For Time, all tracks are well over ten minutes, taking their time to explore “the psychology of sound: expanded consciousness creating meaning out of sonic abstraction.”

   “What becomes of us after we’ve stripped away the familiar. Where does your psyche go? How do you work with what remains after much that you relied on as reality falls away?” It’s up to you to find out.

2. 

   padmin – April 26, 2021

   From Tucson Weekly

   Far Out, Far In: Two new albums from Steve Roach help map meditation

   During a recent online music festival hosted by local artist Steve Roach, listeners agreed Tucson likely has more ambient musicians per capita than any other city—something about the enchantment of the desert and its resulting states of consciousness. But even if the per capita claim isn’t quite true, Roach’s prolific musical output makes up for everyone else.

   April 2 saw two album releases from Roach: As It Is and Temple of the Melting Dawn (a collaboration with Serena Gabriel). These follow another album released in January and multiple last year. Although Roach’s music is often introspective, his ambient style also manages to foster a community—both those who tuned into his SoundQuest online music festival, and the multiple local artists with whom he collaborates.

   “From the years of feedback from my audience, it’s clear they immerse themselves in this psychological spiritual state within my music. A feeling supports one into deeper places within,” Roach said in a press release for As It Is, recorded over the last year.

   As It Is departs from his recent output of more energetic albums, replacing the arpeggiated synthesizer notes on last year’s Tomorrow with darker, soothing tones. And while his more melody-driven output served as an uplifting escape from 2020, As It Is also provides relief from global woes, but rather than rising above them, it dips beneath.

   Over the course of six massive tracks (all of which run longer than 10 minutes) Roach traces a kind of mental meditation journey, beginning with “What Falls Away,” and passing through a “Threshold Meditation,” before ultimately “Emerging.”

   “It’s a daily meditation at that threshold, asking ‘How is today unique? What is unique in this moment? How can I respond to this? What is the thing that’s going to make today unique and empowered through this language of sound and music?'” Roach says.

   The album opener is a series of smooth drones moving at a glacier’s pace that essentially works to get the listener into a proper headspace. It’s only until a few minutes into the second track (about 15 minutes into the album) that any form of percussion appears, but even this is mostly submerged behind the layers of mysterious electronics.

   “Unreachable” includes some rare acoustic instrumentation on the album, with a suspenseful piano hiding within the shifting synthesizers. “Equanimity” references Roach’s more spacey ambient, with futuristic drums and a particularly affecting central melody.

   The album’s theme is hidden in the cover art and connected images—shots of exposed minerals gleaming like the rainbows in oil slicks, hinting at how even when all else is stripped away, there is a vibrancy in the bedrock. Roach describes this theme as a “deep engagement exploring the psychology of sound: expanded consciousness creating meaning out of sonic abstraction.”

   While much of Roach’s decades-long catalog works as a soundscape for meditation and relaxation, As It Is works as an example of the ambient pioneer somewhat mapping the mental journey—not just opening those internal caverns, but shining a light.

   “That unreachable place is something you hear within my music,” Roach says. “I’m reaching towards something I’m never fully grasping, and in that state of not-fully-grasping-it there’s a recognition of knowing it as it is. Perhaps it doesn’t need to be grasped, it can be unreachable, it can remain suspended.”

   As with multiple of his projects, Roach can’t help concluding with a bright ascension, the natural emergence from the deep, thoughtful state As It Is places the listener in.

   “These soundworlds offer nourishment and renewal along with a greater, more expansive state; at the same time I continue to discover a deeply cultivated connection to a core awareness of the self,” Roach said. “Over time, the music helps to build energy and relationship through the self.”

   Temple of the Melting Dawn is the third full-length collaboration with Tucson musician Serena Gabriel, whose acoustic instrumentation and occasional singing add a grounding to Roach’s swirling electronics. Gabriel describes the album, which has a decidedly new age focus, as “perfect for creating sacred space.”

   Unlike their 2020 collaborations, Temple of the Melting Dawn features less of Gabriel’s spiritual singing, instead opting for echoing strings and atmosphere. The real draw is its blend of ancient and modern aesthetics, hinted at with track titles like “Visions of Delphi” and Gabriel’s pensive performances on the lyre, kalimba and flute.

   The album focuses on divination, described in the liner notes as “the practice of seeking knowledge of the unknown by various natural, psychological and other techniques.” Again, similar to the meditative focus of As It Is, but with a potentially more metaphysical bent.

   This goal is also exemplified in the album’s artwork, a desert landscape beneath a powerful sun, warping with a psychedelic overlay.

   This shows strongest in the track “In Another Time,” which runs for a measly 12 minutes as far Roach’s music is concerned. The vastness is necessary for the goal of the music, and that expanse is filled with hushed affirmations and dark ambience.

   Of course, describing ambient music only goes so far, even if it is conceptual. Luckily, Roach and Gabriel’s music often speaks for itself, whether it’s quietly accompanying your thoughts or filling the room. -Jeff Gardner

3. 

   padmin – April 8, 2021

   From Synth & Sequences

   Steve Roach has just got back from his SoundQuest Fest 2021 that he drops in my mailbox a brand-new album that takes a big leap in time, backwards. AS IT IS breathes the scented ambiences of light tribal rhythms of the years when he was nomadic in Australia like in the American deserts. Very beautiful albums came out of this period. Although almost 40 years separate these eras, music still lives as a tonal flower in these territories. These are the flowers that Steve has chosen as a potion for music that has frozen in time. Borrowing spells heard in A Soul Ascends, AS IT IS is neither more nor less a reflection of us discovering the new musical lands of Steve Roach around 88 and 89…

   An oblong line of reverberations meander elements as much celestial as cosmic and even oceanographic in the intriguing opening of What Falls Away. Sweeping an arid land with these reverberations from which wind waves have escaped, this introduction to this new Steve Roach album resembles of his travels in Australia or his deep connections with the land of his ancestors in the Dreamtime Return to Desert Solitaire period. The winds range from singing to resonant with organic breezes, much like the last breaths trapped in a didgeridoo. It’s calm and still mysterious. Like the introduction of Threshold Meditation and its mixture of winds, breaths imprisoned here in abandoned vuvuzelas, astral waves and synth lines with prismatic scents. A nice texture of organic ambiences with percussions drummed slowly, so as to graft poetry in a title where surrealist external elements, like those breaths of a boat a time ago on the Mississippi blew, share its slow passage whose percussions flow would suit to a collective spiritual trance. The form is blurred with a spectral vision which withers at the same time as the rhythm. We stay in the realm of pensive, floating shadows with Unreachable. The synth pads soaring like an eagle without body or legs drift in an ocher-colored night. Pensive piano notes drained of melodies, as well as other undefined chords, are scattered in a zone of ambiences without vitality. Synth lines move like long sleepy snakes that pound themselves on them or curl up in a cave where the rays come from the echoes of ringing lost in an unapproachable area of ​​Unreachable.

   Even in a deep lethargic state, the first 4 minutes of Equanimity hides beautiful synth lines filled with an emotion felt on edge. The title then reaches a phase of soft ambient rhythm provided with good drummed tribal percussions; a bit like in What Falls Away. The synth and the shadow of its waves are like these wings describing large arabesques with touching points of emotionality which have turned the hairs of my shivers upside down. We can see the roots of them now. What a sublime title where there is no lost second! Tears for Time is designed around synth layers accumulating excess numbers in order to weave an opaque ambient texture which gives the impression of constantly drifting. Between these layers hide threads which stand out with a more accentuated moaning hue. But that’s about all. It’s a long, sleepy track. With Equanimity, Emerging form the pair of musical pearls in AS IT IS. Its movement is blown from below to create a perfect papal ambience in a cathedral illuminated by the thousand fires of angels who have become stars. The ears, like my listening room, invaded by these masses which merge, creating eddies from which emerge string instrument notes, to recreate themselves from a simple derivation. Piano or harp, these sometimes faded and sometimes radiant notes dance through the dunes of fog which form balls of dreams only waiting for my closed eyes to inject themselves into them. But there are more intense moments that bring me back to musical memories of other nights when my eyes refused to sleep. These moments which left with a final all of breezes hanging in the void lead me to this eternal reflection; how many lives does Steve Roach have?

   After a great year in 2020 and the frenzy surrounding his virtual shows, my friend Steve is embracing 2021 with as much creativity as he did last year. AS IT IS is the mirror of A Soul Ascends, with a nice touch of ambient tribal, which is little exploited among the 81 minutes of AS IT IS. In fact, the album is more focused on his divinatory style in order to fix our soul in the realm of our emotions through his. It’s beautiful meditative music, as Steve has accustomed us so well over the ages. But really, how much life does he have? Rating: 4/5 -Sylvain Lupari (April 5th, 2021)

4. 

   padmin – April 8, 2021

   From Exposé

   Following last year’s Tomorrow and the powerful Into the Majestic from earlier in 2021, Roach’s latest release As It Is returns the listener to familiar territory with its dreamy mysticism and floating spacious magnificence. With their immersive cosmic beauty and profound subtlety, the six pieces here — most of which merge together seamlessly into a continuum, provide an epic quality that will imbue the listener’s senses with the fundamental life forces that will bring warmth, depth, and an enhanced sense of perception. Most of what’s here bears the motive sensations of subtle, yet constant stirring energies that will gently guide the listener down a path into a magical underworld, where the sounds routinely interact with the mechanisms of life, opening new portals along the way.

   Most of the album’s six pieces are expansive, between eleven and seventeen minutes, with one exception in “Tears for Time” which serves as a shorter interlude between two of the longer pieces, and borne of gentle drifting electronic sounds, not the busy sequences, but the stuff of dreams that float on a pillow of clouds and vapor, with occasional muted percussives, chords overlaying other chords as they drift ambiently along, occasionally punctuated by the color of distant piano sprites and the sound of faint random wood crackles mixing together effortlessly in some swirling cauldron of mystery as in “Unreachable.” One would have to suspect that all of Roach’s sounds here are produced via one of more layers of modular synth as the listener is propelled through the macrocosm. “Equanimity” opens the portal leading the listener back into a more colorful universe where shadows and light mix freely with all the colors from far beyond. Like a spiritual passage through a living dreamworld, the organic sounds of As It Is will cast its spell and soothe the soul as it guides the listener into the endless void. -Peter Thelen

5. 

   padmin – March 9, 2021

   From Avant Music News

   On As It Is, Roach employs his usual layered and shifting synth chords across six tracks, most in the 10-15 minute range. These pieces include a hint of the cosmic, perhaps a soundtrack for looking up at the night sky. Where things really get going, at least to these ears, is on the fourth track, Equanimity. Roach uses tribal percussion, though in a more subdued fashion than his early-to-mid-90’s works, to evoke a more earthbound and organic presence. Other pieces feature gentle, echoing piano coupled with synths and slow cracking noises. This is a very cinematic album and is well worth a listen for any fan, long-time or otherwise. As It Is hits the shelves on April 2. -Mike