Product Description
1. Finding Focus
2. Cloud Theatre
3. Skyline Shards
4. Dusk Portrait
5. Vanishing Point
Disc Two:
6. North Parallel
7. Airspace Vista
8. South Parallel
9. Horizon Convergence
10. Intersecting Fields
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Exposé: "A dreamy and diffuse soundscape… A beautiful two hours of floating sound if there ever was one, Parallels is the ticket that will take you there."
Across 8,500 miles (14,000 kilometres) and one sweeping ocean, pioneering electronic music maestro Steve Roach and new gen artist theAdelaidean align their ambient atmospherics within Parallels, a double album both introspective and otherworldly. Each half of Parallels expands upon themes of togetherness and separation through luminous soundscapes that radiate a gentle warmth. Melodic fragments call across vast, reverberant expanses, revealing unique expressive sensibilities and unexpected creative parallels. The ten tracks are serene and meditative, an immersive crossing of spatial and sonic universes.
This collaboration merges Baja Arizona-based Roach’s decades of mastery sculpting immersive soundworlds with Australia-based theAdelaidean’s delicate, meticulous sound design, taking the listener through a stately unfurling of translucent textures and etheric dronescapes. The synergy between the artists is revealed within the deep, resonating pads, liminal slow-moving sequencers, and occasional brilliant fractures of piano which provide a gentle propulsion through space and silence. Sweeping yet intimate, the over two-hour work concludes with the monumental 45-minute closer, “Intersecting Fields,” resolving on a note of transcendence, a lingering hushed state with fragments of glowing luminosity.
Sean says, “As an author, I’ve listened to Steve’s music while writing for thirty years. His lush, timeless, expansive soundscapes have been a constant backdrop to my creative flow, and you’ll often find thanks to him and references to specific albums in my afterwords. When it comes to making music, I haven’t consciously traveled those same pathways, but I guess it was only a matter of time before I found myself drifting that way in the end. How better to complete the journey than with Steve himself at the helm? When Sam (of Projekt) noted that my early sketches for songs for a new album shared DNA with Steve’s work, reaching out to him to see if he’d be willing to help me take them to the next level felt natural, perhaps even inevitable. I’m so pleased we’ve been able to work together, exchanging files across the Pacific to make Parallels something that belongs to both of us. Parallels has a flow that is different to the one I’m used to feeling with Steve’s music or my own. To me, that makes it even more meaningful.”
Steve reflects, “The parallel realms and creative currents Sean and I have traveled within independently yet deeply connected to and worlds apart over the years regardless of the medium is miraculously manifested on this fateful collaboration. There is a sense of destiny within the creation of this music. These are sonic aspirations born out of the unknown and seized upon in the light of day and dark of night… in the sanctuary of our studio, at two points on the planet.”
Parallels is a testament to the power of the true collaboration, an essential listen for fans of both Roach and theAdelaidean.
ARTIST BIOS:
theAdelaidean is Australian composer and #1 New York Times bestselling author Sean Williams. He has released music as “theAdelaidean” on Projekt, independently and under his real name for exhibitions, film scores, and the stage. Recent years saw world premieres of the multi-artform dance work Bárbaros, nominated for a Ruby Award, the independent films Life Savings and Lucid Dreaming, for which he wrote the scores, and The Magnetic Quiet Zone, an audiovisual installation created with Philip Samartzis and Martin Walch. Sean lives on Kaurna lands, South Australia, and works at Flinders University.
As a pioneering cornerstone of ambient-atmospheric-electronic music, internationally-renowned artist Steve Roach has dedicated his life to exploring myriad soundworlds that express a timeless source of inspiration. Capturing peak moments as they occur in his Timeroom studio or in the live setting, he manifests a sonic experience that breathes a vital life energy, connecting to an ever-expanding global audience. Drawing from his 45-year dedication to the evolution of electronic music, concerts worldwide, and a lifelong passion for the hardware instrument-based way of working, Roach brings us to a summit drawn from his life in the soundcurrent — a timeless ephemeral and empowered space that soothes, inspires and enlightens.
Reviews Editor –
From Chain DLK
How do you measure the distance between two creative souls? With sound, of course. Across 8,500 miles of ocean and 45 years of ambient innovation, Sean Williams (aka theAdelaidean) and Steve Roach traverse not just geography but the uncharted expanse of emotion and shared artistry.
With Parallels, Roach and Williams craft a transcendent, double-disc voyage that is as much about the act of listening as it is about the act of connecting. From the very first shimmer of “Finding Focus” to the monumental closing odyssey, “Intersecting Fields” this collaboration feels like an exploration of unseen threads – those that link lives, ideas, and histories across vast separations.
Roach, the venerable ambient pioneer with decades of studio wizardry, and Williams, an author-turned-composer with a growing foothold in the atmospheric sound world, meet here as equals. Their synergy is less a melding of styles and more an uncovering of shared creative DNA, one deeply rooted in the introspective meditations of ambient music.
The first half of Parallels unfurls with a slow, patient grace. Tracks like “Cloud Theatre” and “Skyline Shards” feel like time-lapse recordings of the sky, where light bends and refracts over infinite horizons. TheAdelaidean’s delicate sense of melody merges seamlessly with Roach’s vast, undulating drones, creating landscapes that are intimate yet boundless.
“Vanishing Point” is a standout – its tones seem to dissolve into themselves, a sonic metaphor for the very act of vanishing, leaving behind a lingering sense of quiet awe.
The second disc ventures closer to Earth but loses none of its ethereal power. Tracks like “North Parallel” and “South Parallel” anchor themselves with gentle sequenced rhythms that pulse like a heartbeat, grounding the listener even as the surrounding textures stretch skyward.
And then there’s “Intersecting Fields”, the 45-minute closing piece – a magnum opus of ambient architecture. It’s a living, breathing space, one that envelops you in layers of sound so subtle and spacious that time itself feels elastic. By the end, you’re left suspended in silence, as if the world has stopped for just a moment to catch its breath.
The irony of Parallels is that its themes of distance and separation are rendered meaningless through the act of collaboration. Here, two artists on opposite sides of the globe build a shared sanctuary of sound, one where their individual voices dissolve into a unified whole. TheAdelaidean’s words about Roach – how his music served as a backdrop to decades of creative writing – add a personal resonance to the project. One can almost imagine Williams at his desk, writing late into the night with Structures from Silence playing softly in the background, only to find himself, decades later, co-creating with the man himself.
Roach, for his part, brings a sense of timeless mastery to the project. His work here is less about innovation and more about refinement, a distillation of his 45 years of sonic exploration into a space where even the simplest tone feels profound.
Final thought on Parallels: it definitely turns out that the shortest path between two points is neither a straight line nor a parallel – it’s the curve of sound. Rating: 4/5 -Vito Camarretta
Reviews Editor –
From Il Circolo Italy
Sean Williams is a professor of creative writing at Flinders University in Adelaide, Ga. Australia. His passions, besides letters (complete with a book at the top of the New York Times bestseller list), are mathematics and music, the latter cultivated through a project called theAdelaidean.
In less than a decade between solo records, collaborations, soundtracks and installations audiovisuals the Australian author has released more than twenty releases, most of them for Projekt Records, where he debuted with the album entitled Isolation, in 2020. Sam Rosenthal’s label, last July 19, also released his new work, entitled Parallels, which sees him collaborating with none other than Steve Roach, tutelary deity of world ambient.
It is a double album containing ten tracks for more than two hours of music in which the styles of the two musicians blend to perfection, avoiding the risk of seeing the Maestro’s influence conditioning the work of the pupil (better: of the relatively young composer but inevitably influenced by the more than forty years of music generated by the one who is the reference point of this genre). Indeed, it is precisely this intersection that allows Williams’ experimentation to find new nuances, new dynamics, new dimensions, building structures that are imposing and at the same time ethereal, where the deepest introspection and the gaze at the infinite spaces of the cosmos find themselves connected along a path that results in the concluding “Intersecting Fields,” a monumental forty-five-minute suite that synthesizes that “sense of destiny within the creation of this music” that Steve Roach has found in the collaboration between two artists who worked “in the sanctuary of our studio, at two points on the planet.” I hope they can “meet” again. — Convergent
Reviews Editor –
From Exposé
Perhaps it was inevitable that this collaboration would eventually come to be; Steve Roach, the master ambient composer and synthesist from Baja Arizona with many decades of experience and well over 200 full-length releases, teaming up with the relative newcomer Sean Williams (“theadelaidean”) from Australia, who hasn’t even been composing these kind of sound sculptures for a full ten years yet, though in that timeframe he has managed to record fourteen releases. Their respective styles travel a similar, though not identical, path, and it’s probably evident to anyone familiar with both that Williams’ ideas in music were influenced to a degree by Roach’s work long before he got started. The fact that both artists record on the Projekt label no doubt had some factor in bringing them together for this two-disc collaborative project, even though it probably came together slowly across the 8,500 miles of Pacific Ocean. As one might predict, the result is a dreamy and diffuse soundscape, consisting of ten tracks of various lengths stretched out across the two discs for over two hours of music, with Roach’s contribution sticking to his floating ambient sound (no hand drums, busy sequenced passages, or didgeridoo) and Williams’ contribution staying close to his electronic ambient sound as well, with only the occasional melodic note or two from the piano.
The first disc launches with eight minutes of “Finding Focus” before easing into the thirteen-minute drift appropriately titled “Cloud Theatre,” a piece that eases gently through waves of warmth and subtlety before its lengthy fade, rising again to present “Skyline Shards,” the longest piece on the first disc at 21 minutes. In contrast, the second disc begins with four shorter pieces, each in the five-minute range with spatial melodic leanings, including “North Parallel,” “Airspace Vista,” “South Parallel,” and “Horizon Convergence,” and then closes with the expansive 45-plus minute epic “Intersecting Fields,” an immersive and meditative trip down the eternal spiral of sound. A beautiful two hours of floating sound if there ever was one, Parallels is the ticket that will take you there. -Peter Thelen
Reviews Editor –
From Dave Aftandilian at Bandcamp
Tranquil, buoyant, and radiant soundtrack to introspective journeys across infinite seas of the imagination. At one point I lie pillowed in thick, warm grass and watch fantastically shaped pink clouds drift slowly across the pale blue sky. Then I find myself watching a fiery sunset reflected across miles of windows in an endless city. As the warm red glow slowly dissolves to deep purple, the noise of the day grows still and my mind drifts upward toward the first gently twinkling stars of night.