Product Description
2 Trance Spirits — 2022 Remaster
3 Off Spring — 2022 Remaster
4 Seekers — 2022 Remaster
5 The Calling — 2022 Remaster
6 Year of the Horse — 2022 Remaster
7 In The Same Deep Water — 2022 Remaster
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Projekt’s remastered edition of 2002’s Trance Spirits returns to a hypnotic world of primal, passionate percussion innerwoven with a tapestry of sonic atmospheres and electronic hybrid grooves. These seven tracks pierce time with the heartbeat pulse of the electronic soul welded to organic drums of skin and wood, a rush of ecstatic spirit-catching rhythms elevating a meditative trance state.
Orchestrating a thunderous album of sound, Steve Roach’s expansive array of synthetic soundworlds, hybrid groove percussion, and textural guitar-based atmospheres overlays the timbre-rich beauty of Middle Eastern and West African-influenced drumming. Pounding, pulsating percussion from drummers Jeffrey Fayman and Momodou Kah was recorded as a real-time continuum with long-form grooves performed live in the studio. Entranced by their own propulsive spirals, the grooves evolve over the course of the tracks — it’s a complex juggernaut. Later, in the Timeroom, Roach and Fayman shaped those initial recordings with Roach sculpting an overlay of electronics performed in the moment. Augmented on three tracks with subtle guitar tonalities from King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, the 74 minutes of music unleash primal forces with an intense undercurrent of rich, transporting rhythms anchoring the body to the energies of the earth and sky.
Sonic Curiosity: Expect dense trance music here: expansive regions of atmospheric drones punctuated by tribal percussion and astral tonalities. Sonic clouds roil and ooze with haunting moods that envelop the audience, lifting them from the earth and elevating them into realms that exist only in the mind.
Out-of-print on CD for almost a decade, Trance Spirits‘ throbbing, insistent mysterious rite employs ancient and modern musical devices to traverse layers of consciousness, reaching an ecstatic state of full body engagement trance illumination.
Reviews Editor –
From Audion #71
Steve Roach has often gone down the route of combining tribal type rhythmic structures in his music, sometimes playing said percussion himself. But, to really create a vibrant drum sound, he needed a master of doing so, and took on Jeffrey Fayman to play in real time along with him. It amounts to a strange creation with Steve’s music moving at a slow sometimes imperceptible speed, with the hand percussives surging at what seems to be their own page, yet somehow locking-in and becoming this music of sharp contrasts in its breadth and flow. Not all of it is surging beats though, as the third track Off Flow only has a beat emerging in the background for part of its duration. Apparently there are also some Robert Fripp guitar soundscapes are present in three tracks, although I failed to notice them.
reviews editor –
A review from Expose by Peter Thelen
Jeffrey Fayman is a Los Angeles based composer, percussionist, and producer, who makes the better part of his living doing soundtrack work for film trailers and television, and is co-founder of Immediate Music (along with Yoav Goren) which produces library music used in all types of televison shows, sports features, and feature films. He also has a history of collaborations with Steve Roach, Byron Metcaf, Robert Fripp, Ten Seconds, and others. The album at hand dates from 2002, and has been out of print for at least a decade, now returning with a full remastering In 2022. It features Fayman on frame drum and percussion on all tracks, with Roach providing his electronic soundworlds plus additional guitar and percussion within which the seven pieces can develop. Momodou Kah joins them on many of the tracks, providing West African percussion, and Robert Fripp features on three with his subtle guitar mastery, including the opener “Taking Flight” and the closer “In the Same Deep Water.” One might think (incorrectly) that with all these drums and two percussionists on board, that this would be a noisy affair with pounding tribal drums that never let up. In fact the mix of electronics, guitar, and percussion is very gentle, subtle, and immersive, inviting the listener into this mystical spiritual trance world. The drums and percussion are always audible, but on an even level with Roach’s swirling electronics, creating a enveloping texture, neither overpowering the mix. Although there are seven tracks, the boundary between them is typically a point where the percussion winds down and a new idea begins, as if the entire album is one long continuum, recorded by Roach and Fayman in a single session, with Kah and Fripp adding their parts after the fact. Interesting sonic curiosities greet the listener at many points along this 74-minute journey, a listener may wonder how these sounds are made, but it’s probably best to just absorb what’s there and let the magic carpet take you wherever it may go.
Reviews Editor –
From CD Hot List
I’ve been watching guitarist and composer Steve Roach’s career for decades now. His music has often been just a little bit too New Agey for me, but this new release and reissue of a 20-year-old album have me reconsidering my assessment of his work. Trance Spirits is a remastered release of an album he made in 2002 with percussionist Jeffrey Fayman; guitarist Robert Fripp(!) and percussionist Momodou Kah. Here it’s actually drums that occupy center stage: Kah and Fayman build steady, rippling patterns under which Roach and Fripp create floating clouds of chordal ambience that shift slowly under the busy drumming. -Rick Anderson