Steve Roach - The courier of ambient music

The world is full of musicians who are famous but not very influential, and others who are both influential and famous; then there are niche musicians who, despite being hugely influential, remain known only to a limited circle of listeners. One of these is Steve Roach, the self-taught American synthesist who, starting from the end points reached by the German cosmic couriers ("the gates of the cosmos up there in Germany") and above all from the advanced ambient and ethnic theorizing of Brian Eno and Jon Hassell, carried out an extreme synthesis of them, in parallel with the equally crucial work of his fellow countryman Robert Rich, imposing a new vision of electronic and ambient music that was later elevated into a cognitive system by hundreds of followers and thus codified into a style, to the point of giving rise to a genuine standard, destined to become the very reference point for the definition of ambient music itself.

Carrying the Eno-ian concept of music applied to space toward a conception devoid of physical dimensions: this is the best summary of Roach's work, whose music abandons the object and the earthly environment (be it the airport or the humus) to abstract itself toward everything that is infinite and undefined. Whether directed toward the cosmos, the void, or new and imaginary environments, the Californian's explorations always manage to move beyond any limited imagery, evoking "new", unimaginable visions, without ever slipping into the realm of the artificial (a trait typical instead of his contemporary Robert Rich).

The "Berlin" period (1979-1983)

Steve Roach was born in La Mesa, California, in 1955. His first passion was motorcycling, something he still pursues today, to the point of owning an enviable collection of high-displacement motorcycles (from Guzzi to Harley-Davidson), while his passion for music blossomed much later: at the age of twenty, Roach began taking an interest in the world of electronic instruments, teaching himself how to harness the potential of the synthesizer. This self-taught approach to music would prove decisive for the musician's sonic approach and for the minimalist sonic evolutions that would become his trademark.

After a few years of apprenticeship, documented by Moebius, his first work and a tribute to the lesser-known half of Cluster, he made his debut in 1982 with Now, an album that's still immature and heavily indebted to the work of Klaus Schulze, with keyboard flourishes and rhythmic patterns typical of the Berlin school.

Traveller the following year doesn't stray far, with propulsive, powerful tracks still anchored to a minimalist root, where arpeggiators play a leading role in sketching out looped, hypnotic melodic structures.

The sonic coordinates of these first three works would resurface starting with the next album as well, which would mark the turn toward a minimalism of pure ambient music.

The ambient turn (1983-1986)

The first truly great album capable of representing Roach's sound arrives in 1984. In the three suites of Structures From Silence, a more personal vision of music begins to take shape: the minimalism explored in his first three works is wrapped in a thick ambient blanket, heavily indebted to the work of Brian Eno but at the same time containing a new way of understanding the non-musician's innovations. In the piano drops surrounded by reverb on "Reflection In Suspension", in fact, Roach produces a genuine trait d'union between "Music For Airports" and the cosmic saturations of early Tangerine Dream, tackling the fusion in the name of a pronounced melodic development. The same theme is at the forefront of "Quiet Friend", through whose textures silence and descriptive power intertwine, reaching its first great apotheosis in the nearly half-hour-long title track: along the melodic rises and falls wrapped in endless reverb lies, in fact, a new way of understanding ambient music that would become standard in the years to come, with Roach as its master and foremost interpreter, transforming a music whose purpose was to serve as the backdrop to an environment, whether spatial or mental, into a genuine canvas on which to depict, animate or even create the environment itself.

Structures From Silence is Steve Roach's first masterpiece, underrated at the time, but capable of foreshadowing what would become the manifesto of his revolution.

In 1986, the musician released the three chapters of Quiet Music, a limited edition series pressed only on cassette, which would only become widely available thirteen years later through Fortuna Records, before the definitive reissue by Projekt in 2011. It could be described as his "Discreet Music": in the suites of volumes 1 and 3, Roach dismantles and deconstructs his sound sculptures, attempting to bring out their more "natural" side. The result is only partly convincing, carrying his musical landscape outside the constructions of Structures From Silence and bringing it much closer to acoustic new age.

Quiet Music is a statement of intent, the seal of Roach's sonic coordinates broken down to their bare essentials, anything but indicative of what his future output would be.

That same year also saw the arrival of a new album, Empetus. It's a collection of tracks dating back to the "minimal" period of his early days and his most recent return to the dynamics of sequencers and synthetic percussion that trace a love for Tangerine Dream. Compared to his very first works, there's a greater awareness in the use of the electronic medium, leading to a deep exploration of the "visceral" side (by his own admission) of Roach's music. The best examples are the analog motorik of "Arrival" and "Conquest", the carefree melodicism of "Merge" and the evocative, spatial soundtrack of "Twilight Heat", while the abyssal "The Memory" brings to light one of his earliest experiments in the world of ambient.

In 2008 the album was remastered by Projekt with the addition of two new tracks, both clearly derived from Schulze: the endless, exhausting analog battle of "Harmonia Mundi" and the shimmering mountain of "Release".

Empetus is a final manifesto of the very earliest Roach, and without a doubt the best of his "minimalist" albums. After this temporary detour, however, our man would be busy producing two of the fundamental chapters of his career.

The revolution of the new ambient music (1986-1989)

1987 is marked solely by a collaboration with three other leading figures of the ambient renewal: Kevin Braheny, guru of Hearts Of Space, Thom Brennan, a contemporary sound sculptor of stellar importance but less well known, and the late oboist Richard Burmer. The result is Western Spaces, an album dedicated to the desert and rather far removed from the four musicians' usual sonic territory. Rhythm takes center stage, dictating the law amid the scorching filigree of "The Breathing Stone", while restless, arid traces cross paths in the stroll of "Desert Walkabout". And while "New Moon At Forbidden Mesa" and the lengthy "In The Heat Of Venus" return to navigating the usual placid, clear waters, the closing title track sinks into polished synergies closer to Brehany's sublunary worlds.

A first step toward the revolution that would arrive shortly thereafter, Western Spaces offers us a striking synthesis of the ambient moods and styles of the new decade, polished to a shine by four of the most brilliant minds in the genre's history.

The following year opens once again under the sign of partnership: The Leaving Time sees the Californian's soundscapes interface with the dazzling percussion of Michael Shrieve, best known for his role in Santana. An ideal counterpart to the ambient weave of Structures From Silence, this is a work centered on the rhythm of Shrieve's percussion, with Roach busy chiseling out languid openings amid the imposing, mammoth drumming. The tension stays high on the opening title track and on the closing reprise, while "Tribes" and "Big Running" are true previews of the "tribal" turn that will mark the Nineties. More measured, though hardly relaxed, are "San Diego" and "Theme For The Far Away", where Shrieve lets himself go amid hypnotic synthesizer lines, dictating their tempo with meticulous precision.

The Leaving Time is a preview of the "rhythmic" side that will resurface shortly after in Roach's masterpiece, as well as a chance to hear together two musicians as distant as they are essential within their respective fields.

It's in that same year, in fact, that Roach reaches one of the peaks of his career with Dreamtime Return, a seminal album for the development of modern ambient and an indissoluble treatise that at least three subsequent generations would follow to the letter. Roach draws inspiration from the life and spirituality of Australian Aborigines, and this is precisely the focus of the entire work. Split across two discs, the album brings together most of the souls that will characterize his output: the ethnic-tribal one — which will later flow into his hypno-trance turn — on the first record, and the purely ambient-cosmic one on the second. This "new ambient" is a far cry from the "non-musician" and "non-music" of Brian Eno: Roach stages a Copernican revolution of the very concept of ambient music, in which it is no longer music as amorphous background or blank slate, but rather the catharsis of a personal psychodrama.

On the first disc, the opening one-two of "Toward The Dreams" and "The Continent" immediately introduces the rhythmic element, while at the same time falling back on melodic undercurrents of extraordinary impact; meanwhile, in the quiet pulsations of "Songline" and "Atribe Meets The Dream Ghosts" lie hidden the same minimalist nods that had marked the first phase of his career, reworked here though under the banner of an ethno-ambient close to the contemporary work of Forrest Fang, who in turn owes a great deal to this very album. Sharp abstraction instead pervades the romantic string interplay of "The Other Side", among the finest achievements of his entire output, and the visionary mass of "A Circular Ceremony", while pure atmosphere takes over in the closing triptych of "Magnificent Gallery", "Truth In Passing" and, above all, "Australian Dawn - The Quiet Earth Cries Inside".

The second half, on the other hand, is entirely devoted to the reprise of the cosmic ambient that had made Structures From Silence great, and which — together with the one stemming from his rhythmic side — will be the starting point for much of Roach's subsequent output, moving between nods to the most elegant and refined new age ("Through A Strong Eye"), bows to the best of Harold Budd ("Truth In Passing") and gestures toward desolation (the closing "The Return").

Dreamtime Return is not only Steve Roach's masterpiece, but also, and above all, the keystone of ambient music to come: anyone who has taken up the genre after 1987 owes a good deal of their inspiration to this album. From the Californian scene of Stearns and Brennan to the recent electro-acoustic drifts, passing too through the standard-bearers of modern nostalgic ambient (Max Corbacho and Craig Padilla above all), there is no artist or work that doesn't carry in its DNA a molecule originating from this record. Capable of reproducing, through compositionally advanced means, the primordial sense of sound and sensation — which lives and takes on meaning only through interaction with the listener in a given time and space — Dreamtime Return is a work steeped in refinement and microstructure, minimal in its overflow and rich in innovation within its simplicity.

Just a few months later, Roach crowns his revolution by gathering, on the epoch-making Stormwarning, two lengthy performances that serve as a kind of summary of his first decade of activity. Across the fabric of the two long suites, the multi-instrumentalist moves between synths, percussion and traditional instruments, blending all the styles he had traversed in the first part of his career. "Day One", dated 1985, naturally fuses the textures of Structures From Silence with the sequencers of Empetus, in twenty minutes of pure historical archive.

But it's with the half-hour "Day Two" that the live dimension polishes up the Roach of Dreamtime Return: amid vibrant percussion sections, cathartic textures with an epic flavor and descents into the most visceral ambient, the artist retraces the innovations of his masterpiece, presenting them to an audience gathered in religious silence.

In the 1999 remaster by Timeroom, a third suite is added to the tracklist, "Day Three", dating from 1991 and anchored instead in the placid, dreamlike atmospheres of ambient-era Roach, broken up by the occasional purely cosmic interlude. The definitive edition would instead arrive in 2012, courtesy of Projekt.

The performances on Stormwarning reveal the strength of the Californian's music, able to cut the thread that had indissolubly tied ambient to the recording studio in the work of Eno and Budd, in favor of a conception that retains the hallmarks of those origins while amplifying the potential of a music finally able to be reproduced and to adapt to any environment.

And it is precisely the multimedia nature of his music that will become a fundamental language in Roach's sonic outpourings, as he also busies himself providing his compositions as backdrops for visual works: examples include "Earth Dreaming" and "Space Dreaming", two short films directed by Georgianne Cowan and visual interpretations of Dreamtime Return and Structures From Silence respectively. The tools offered by the new millennium will allow the Californian to pick up this thread again through the Immersions series, true video-sound sculptures that will mark his arrival at Sam Rosenthal's Projekt.

Collaborations and ethnic contamination (1989-1992)

The jolt that Dreamtime Return delivered to ambient would spark in Roach a genuine creative fever, leading him to produce on average three or four albums a year between solo projects and collaborations, many of them able to forcefully reaffirm his name and keep him permanently at the crest of the wave. Before this outburst, though, there is still room for a few essential works that would lead the Californian's style to evolve and shift, eventually landing on rhythmic, hypnotic shores that would mark a genuine "split" in his output.

1989 continues with two hugely important collaborations, which see him share the stage with the four most important of his contemporaries in the ambient field. The first brings together a dream trio of Californian minds: alongside Roach are none other than Michael Stearns and Kevin Braheny, and the result takes shape as Desert Solitaire, a kind of sequel to Western Spaces on the theme of the desert. The pieces composed by Roach alone are direct descendants of Dreamtime Return: "Flatlands" picks up its ethereal percussion, while "Specter" picks up its paradisiacal visions. Stearns, meanwhile, offers the classic celestial architectures of his most visionary side: "From The Heart Of The Darkness" and "Shiprock" do so through silence and whispers of acoustic instruments, recalling "Lycia", while "Labyrinth" gives itself over to the sonic constellations already explored in "M'Ocean" and "Floating Whispers".

More beguiling are Braheny's ethnic branches on "Knowledge And Dust" and "Empty Time", while the peaks of the entire work are without doubt "The Canyon's Embrace" and "Cloud Of Promise", cathartic symphonies devoid of any spatio-temporal coordinates, where ambient plunges ever further into paths of solitude and ethereal desolation, shedding its "material" character. The same effect is found in "Highnoon", with its more "cosmic" flavor, and in the closing title track credited to Roach-Braheny, an ideal farewell to the desert along a quiet, mysterious night.

Desert Solitaire works as a genuine exchange of ambitions between three giants of ambient music: taking turns weaving through each other's stylistic traits, blending and merging them, it's a thoroughly successful record, fundamental to the continuation of all three careers.

Almost simultaneously comes the first four-handed duet with the pioneer of ambient minimalism Robert Rich, the first of two installments from the duo.

Strata is a true kaleidoscope, ranging from hypnotic sound-sculptures to ethnic mantras and whispered ambient dreamscapes, and also marks the first alliance with Hearts Of Space, the American label that would go on to become a true reference point for the American ambient scene. The first category includes the colossal ouverture of "Fearless" and the tribal "Mica" and "Iguana", essentially outtakes from the rhythmic side of Dreamtime Return. The droning carpets of "Magma" and "Remembrace" are instead marked by dark, sinister atmospheres, foreshadowing a style Roach would crown in the new millennium, while Rich's finely chiseled samples take over in the pure new-age of "The Grotto Of Time Lost" and the gentle field recordings of "Ceremony Of Shadows", coiling and mixing with Roach's soundscapes in the Salvador Dalí tribute "Persistence Of Memory".

Rounding out the picture are the gentle, almost acoustic brushstrokes of the graceful "Forever" and the meditative "Remembrance", before the synthesizers stretch out placidly in the closing, paradisiacal "La Luna", drifting fragilely until the dance comes to an end.

A kind of meeting point between new-age, the fourth-world music of Jon Hassell and the early world-music experiments of Jade Warriors, Strata stands as one of the best ambient records of the period, intelligible and far from isolationist leanings, deep and serene.

After a journey through Oceania that occupies him throughout 1991, and which inspires the ill-fated detour of Australia: Sounds Of The Heart — a collection of aseptic, jagged digeridoo fragments conceived alongside musicologist and researcher Sarah Hopkins and the instrument's reigning master David Hudson — Roach delivers in 1992 a new, important chapter in his ambient saga. World's Edge is a natural continuum of Dreamtime Return, from which it also inherits the double-CD format, and the forerunner of Roach's ambient productions, which from this point on would alternate with works rooted in tribal and cosmic sounds and a new form of ambient-trance.

The first half of the album gathers ten gems that are potent together: in the opening ten minutes of the title track, the devotion to Kevin Braheny and his expansive architectures is shaken up by cosmic-concrete torpedoes and unusually hypnotic rhythms, foreshadowing precisely the trance turn of the late millennium. The theme is picked up again in ethnic tribalism on "The Call" and "Thunderground", and in technological vertigo on "Steel And Bone", while soft flows wrap and shape the remaining tracks, ranging from oblique, tense moods ("Undershadow", "When Souls Roam") to dreamlike sublunar prayers ("Glimpse" and the masterpieces "Falling, Flying, Dreaming" and "Drift").

"Beat Of Desire", meanwhile, is a preview of the plunge into pure cosmic territory on the second disc, entirely taken up by the nearly hour-long "To The Threshold Of Silence", an extremely minimal work that revisits, in a less harsh and dramatic way, the lesson of Tangerine Dream's "Zeit". It's a subliminal piece, carrying a vague sense of looming drama, with the chords succeeding one another as if repeating a cycle, only to slowly reveal themselves to be very far from the starting point, in a creative spiral that ensnares and wins you over.

World's Edge continues Roach's path of excellence, further expanding and developing the innovations already put forward previously and unveiling one of the finest examples of the fusion between ambient and cosmic music. The musician would revisit this pursuit in many later works, in most cases managing to reach an equally high level, barring a small minority of lesser efforts, most likely caused by the productive euphoria that would take hold of him starting from the turn of the millennium.

That same year, the collaboration with Rich is renewed with what remains, to date, the last album credited to the duo. Soma is an introverted, psychedelic album, immersed in electro-ethnic environments rich in percussive pulses and subterranean oscillations that foreshadow some of the works to come. Its main distinguishing trait is the emphasis on the tribal side, which would find its focal point in the Suspended Memories project. Even so, the spell of Strata fails to repeat itself: Roach's contribution stands out in the best moments, such as the lukewarm new-age opening of the closing "Touch" and the layered construction of the atonal "Seduction Of The Minotaur", while the droning Rich produces the title track and "Silk Ridge", fine sonic backdrops that nonetheless lack the charge needed to truly soar.

Much of the album sinks into percussion and Martian beats that are flawless in execution but fail to land: the opening "Love Magick" and "Going Ingland" attempt it by giving themselves over to pure world music, ending up looking like mere exercises in style, while "Nightshade" and "Blood Music" aim to enchant and hypnotize, again without succeeding.

From the false tension of Soma emerges once again the pair's considerable technical skill, which however is not matched by any real emotion, and the album, though not quite a genuine misstep, is without doubt the least successful offspring since the days of Structures From Silence.

Tribal rhythms and percussion: the new frontier and the creative crisis (1993-1995)

In the years that follow, Roach decides to temporarily set ambient aside to focus on ethnic-tribal research and the building of new musical instruments: despite the brief duration of this "turn", the albums involved would be numerous, and in most of them the Californian would fail to reach the artistic peaks touched during his ambient explorations.

The real turning point toward this shift is the Californian's involvement in the side project Solitaire, which has him sharing compositional duties with Elmar Schulte — a kind of percussion shaman, influenced by the extreme lessons of the zombie Zero Kama. It's 1993, and the result is Ritual Ground, a flat, exhausted collage of ethnic percussion and electronic flows, unable to merge and balance one another as in the past, due above all to the overwhelming presence of the former. A work steeped in mannerism, far removed from the results achieved with Shrieve a few years earlier, the album is the antechamber to the collapse that would follow in many of his "tribal" works.

That same year, Roach decided to dig into his archive, releasing the first installment of what would become a proper series. The Lost Pieces collects ten outtakes produced in the Eighties for compilations and visual works, spanning nearly every style that defined the early phases of his career. The rhythmic melodies of "After The Dream" and "Since We Are Away" and the heavenly openings of "Eclipse" and "Mojave" draw directly from the gentle expanses of Quiet Music and the rhythmic edifices of Dreamtime Return, while the reflective contemplations of "Red Shore", "Repose" and "Closer" are kin to Structures From Silence and World's Edge. Looking ahead to his more recent explorations, instead, are the dark "Full Moon Prophecy" and "Three Repties Wait At The Opening To The Underworld", reminiscent of Desert Solitaire and Strata and not far removed from Stearns and Rich.

The Lost Pieces is a box of fragments and notes left out of the development of Roach's ambient work, largely on a par with his finest efforts, and it sets the tone for a practice that would be punctually repeated in the years to come.

A single, isolated exception comes instead with the founding of the supergroup Suspended Memories, formed alongside two other notable names: Jorge Reyes, the Mexican "disciple" of Roach's ethno-ambient work, and Suso Saiz, a pioneer of a mystical and tangled new age.

The first fruit of the project is Forgotten Gods, already released a year earlier in Mexico alone through the small Grabaciones Lejos Del Paraiso, and distributed overseas once again by Hearts Of Space. The album, bolstered by a perfect interplay between the three, essentially acts as a litmus test for the paths each of them had carved out in their respective careers: here again is the tribal-ethereal Roach on "Different Deserts", the claustrophobic Roach on "Suspended Memories, Forgotten Gods" and the drone-laden, Rich-esque Roach on "Night Devotion".

Reyes is perhaps the least present of the three – emerging forcefully only in the sacred-ethnic "Snake Song" and the placid sinuousness of "Saguaro" – while Saiz and his oblique textures rise to dominance in the scorching expanses of "Mutual Tribes", in the industrial noise of "Ritual Noise" and in the unsettling opening of the closing, desert-like "Shaman's Dream".

Forgotten Gods is a work that recycles elements from all three artists' pasts without ever fully leaning on them, skillfully blending history and experimentation. Thanks above all to Saiz's jagged, never-predictable touches, the record also turns out to be one of the least accessible and most "avant-garde" pieces Roach ever composed, though it remains a solitary detour before a string of lesser albums.

These take shape in quick succession, under the names Origins and Artifacts, united both in sound and in artwork. The first, also from 1993, is made up of seven genuine monoliths, with Roach donning the guise of a shaman and continuing the discourse begun with Australia a few years earlier, while the second – released a year later – is its evolution, built around ethnic instruments (the digeridoo above all) and a true about-face from the sound of his ambient masterpieces. The twin birth of tribal elements and percussion confronts us with a side of Roach's music devoid of pathos and inspiration, a direction that would continue even in the illusory reunion with Michael Stearns for the album Kiva, a kind of exploration of traditional Native American music that comes dangerously close to the most predictable trappings of ethnic new age.

The Roach of these records is light years away from the architect who had masterfully shaped the entire ambient scene of the Eighties, and he progressively loses the distinguishing traits that had made his music both evocative and revolutionary at the time. But that "tribal" phase would prove to be a mere parenthesis, destined to flow into a new, subsequent frontier, one that would lead the musician – alongside releases closer to his "classic" sound – to fuse his ambient music and percussive exercises with the vibrant textures of trance music, allowing him to once again personalize his style and return to the heights he had temporarily abandoned.

The partnership with Dirk Serries and cosmic ambient (1995-1999)

The second half of the Nineties would be marked, for the Californian, by a return to his ambient roots, which allowed him to reclaim the glories of his career, and by his meeting with Dirk Serries, alias vidnaObmana, a contemporary Belgian figure on the ambient scene with an extremely varied résumé. Alongside him, and on his own, Roach would produce some of the most striking chapters of his career, definitively establishing himself as one of the greatest ambient musicians of all time and successfully experimenting – after the tribal phase – with a new form of cross-pollination, this time between his own music and the legacy of the German cosmic couriers.

The first of these records – whose original pressing dates back to 1994, limited to 1000 copies, before its definitive reissue on Timeroom, the label Roach himself would found a few years later – is titled The Dream Circle and sees Roach return to a more conventionally electro-ambient language, reaching the peak of formal perfection: across the hour-and-a-quarter suite that makes up the entire record, a mass takes shape in extremely slow, constant transformation, with sonic sub-units intersecting in a virtually infinite process. It is also the first work to feature a single-track structure in place of individual songs, a compositional method the musician would later revisit on many of his most "nostalgic" records, closest to the canons of pure ambient. Roach's music has never been more abstract, more evanescent, and yet so quietly dramatic and dialectical in telling a story without words, a bodiless yet real universe, a world of shadows, anemic and metaphorical.

The Dream Circle marks, at once, Roach's return to the shores most akin to him, his resurrection, and the prelude to the two towering episodes that would follow. The Californian's first true concept album, it stands as the genuine starting point of a saga destined to continue prolifically amid the production frenzy of the new millennium.

1995 marks the meeting and the beginning of the partnership with the aforementioned Dirk Serries, a Belgian musician with a multifaceted and varied background who had recently signed to Sam Rosenthal's Projekt, the most important label of the entire American dark-gothic scene: an illegitimate son of Coil's industrial sound, he had ranged from a Lustmord-indebted dark-ambient to a brighter blend of drones and atmosphere, all the way to a ritual-ambient drift largely inspired by Dreamtime Return. And it is precisely this collaboration that would introduce Roach to the Projekt roster, for what would become an extremely important relationship in both their histories.

The first offspring of the duo, which kicks off an artistic path destined to endure prolifically to this day, is titled Well Of Souls and stands as one of the high points of ambient music. Unlike what had happened before in Roach's collaborations with his contemporaries, it's impossible to assign either of the two a dominant authorship over the record or its individual pieces: Roach and Serries don't simply converse and trade ideas, but weave them deeply together, managing to create a personal, seductive sound through an endless variety of nuances.

The record is a monumental double album (though the tracklist consists of "only" eight tracks), made up half of suites lasting around half an hour each, and half of long digressions hovering around the ten-minute mark. And while in the latter the two seem almost to "rein in" their inspiration, channeling it toward earthly contamination (the opening "In The Presence Of Something") rather than purity (the swarm of heavenly drones in "The Quiet Companion", the placid meditation of "The Dwelling Place"), the record's true, deepest meaning is anchored precisely in the boundless journeys of its longer tracks. Thus the two halves of "Outlands" open the doors to a ritual that is at first cosmic ("In The Realm Of Twilight") and then formless ("The Secret Arrival"), paving the way for the triptych that follows: "The Gathering", which closes the first disc, is a scorching sublunar pastiche of icy pulsations and blazing sonic masses, while "Deep Hours" soars toward the apocalypse of boundless emptiness, and the title track – a prime candidate for masterpiece-within-the-masterpiece status – runs aground on the terrain of a desert-like, oblique, almost agonizing resignation.

Well Of Souls opens the tandem project of Roach and Serries under the banner of excellence, standing as one of the most complex and grandiose records in either man's discography, and as one of the least accessible yet most creatively dense works of the entire movement. Heavily indebted to the German pioneers and carrying forward a fusion of that current with the crystalline ambient music of Structures From Silence, it is also - alongside Roach's subsequent solo output - the crowning achievement of the Californian's new path, devoted precisely to theorizing the most natural of symbioses: that between the environment and the cosmos, and between their two respective musical currents.

Just a few months later, the Californian's career gains another thrilling chapter. Back home at Hearts Of Space, Roach releases what is without doubt the purest manifesto of his music: The Magnificent Void.

If Dreamtime Return was the treatise on every facet of the new ambient music, this new work is instead a surrogate built by subtraction, in which the Californian returns to a purely cosmic, arrhythmic dimension, stripping his music of any ornamental contamination. The record boasts a phenomenal stylistic rigor that translates into tremendous atmosphere, making it not only one of the most paradigmatic entries in his entire discography, but also one of the most complete and evocative expressions of his subliminal poetics. Thus the sly, withdrawn minimalism of the opening "Between The Grey And The Purple" acts as a silent approach to the material, later developed in the layered labyrinth of "Infinite Shore" and the universal catharsis of "Cloud Of Knowing".

The synthetic expanses of these pieces are held up by the rigid, compact sonic pillars of the three main themes, namely the muffled, cyclical "Void Memory One", the rarefied, dronic "Void Memory Two" and the lush, visionary "Void Memory Tree", before the entire construction surrenders to the warm embrace of the masterpiece "Altus", twenty minutes of inter-universal crossing in which the refraction of sound waves, in constant alternation of crescendo and decrescendo, tends to stir a pull toward alienation and total immersion in the sonic environment.

The Magnificent Void is the true final document of Roach's research into ambient music, a treatise more important for its status as a summation of an entire generation than for any innovations or novelties it proposes. Recovering the atmospheric simplicity of Structures From Silence and the cosmic wanderings of the Braheny-Clark duo, the album proves to be one of the peaks of the musician's output, on a par with Well Of Souls and second only to Dreamtime Return.

In 1996, Roach took part, at Hearts Of Space's request, in the album Halcyon Days, a sort of return to the ethnic contamination he had previously explored. But the record turns out far removed from the tribal epitaphs of the mid-90s, and seems rather to evolve the formula (itself not entirely successful) tried earlier on Australia: Sounds Of The Earth. The Californian is joined by Stephen Kent - another well-known didgeridoo player - and by Canadian artist Kenneth Newby, one of the first artists to ride the multimedia wave. To be understood mainly as a project of the latter, the album draws wholesale on the world-music revolution of Peter Gabriel and his "Passion", while also positioning itself as a synthesis between the spiritual corporeality of percussion and traditional instruments and the spatiality of synthesizers. The result neither strikes deep nor excels, though it still offers an extremely complex listen, and without doubt better than similar past experiments.

Of far greater importance is instead the second collaboration alongside Serries, a genuine prediction of the paths Roach would take in the new millennium. Once again made up of fifteen-to-twenty-minute suites, Cavern Of Sirens gradually introduces the elements the Californian would develop shortly after. The album is a true crash course, where the two dig up and revisit their respective pasts (the tribal one for Roach, the psycho-industrial one for Serries): tangible proof comes in the percussive hypnosis of "Hidden Earth And The Shadows Dance" and the icy, gripping overture of "Ascension For Protection", where the two men's ambitions are revisited with far greater care and inspiration than before.

Looking ahead, meanwhile, are the record's best moments: "The Current Below" recovers the ethno-atmospheric formula, again brushing against new-age territory (though this time refined and lush), while the odyssey of "Middle World Passage" flows smooth and floating, picking up the pace, charging its melodic lines with emotional tension, and standing as the forerunner of ambient-trance. The nostalgic closer "The Graceful Sky" instead travels in retrospection, saturating the atmosphere with melancholy, sibylline, cyclical melodies, under the banner of stillness and deep purity.

Cavern Of Sirens reworks in a "new" guise a duo that seems to understand each other perfectly, delivering a product of once again superb quality, a glimpse projected toward the explorations that Roach (but Serries too) would pursue in the years to come. In silence, and unbeknownst to many, ambient-trance was born.

A year later, the Californian brought back to the stage a live experience sonically similar to The Magnificent Void, conceived as a sort of journey to a distant, desert planet, thus also crowning, on a conceptual level, his cosmic vision of ambient music. The performance, among the finest and most engaging he ever delivered, is documented on the album On This Planet, a genuine musical logbook of Roach the astronaut-explorer, containing - among other things - some "discoveries" that would be picked up again on later albums.

The tale begins with "Heart Of The Tempest", where the roaring wind of the "new" planet's atmosphere welcomes us into a wild void, before percussion already markedly trance in nature leads us onto its surface: "Journey Of One" is thus the first official birth of the Roach-to-come, so much so that the identically-titled 2011 live masterpiece would stem directly from it. "The Nexus Place", under the sign of an alien, chilling ethnic quality, tells us of the customs and habits of the population discovered, while "Void Memory 4" has the "earthling" reveal details about his planet, reworking the three parts of the identically-titled composition from The Magnificent Void.

We then move on to a detailed account of the surrounding environment: describing it for us are the static stillness of "Cloud Watching The Toolmaker" and the ten minutes of pure, chilling trancedelia of "Remember It Now". "The Ecstasy Of Travel" instead retraces the practical and emotional trials of interstellar travel, before the farewell, represented by the swallowed breaths of "A Darkest Star" and the closing catharsis of the splendid quarter-hour title track: the journey is over, it is time for nostalgia and memories, cradled by romantic drones and languid, overlapping synthesizer lines that complete each other in a cycle as indelible as the memory of the crossing.

On This Planet translates into imagery what Roach's journey has been over these last, fantastic years, and reconfirms - were it ever needed - his tremendous skill as a performer. It is the hypothetical closing of a cycle, and at the same time a first, concrete introduction to the world of ambient-trance, whose true manifesto would arrive two years later with the beautiful Light Fantastic.

1998 would see Roach found his own distribution label, Timeroom, and produce two albums: the dim, static Slow Heat, a first reprise of the single-track structure already tried on The Dream Circle, whose ambient textures nonetheless fail to stir real emotion, and the surprising Dust To Dust, made in collaboration with guitarist and bassist Roger King, which would remain a one-off experiment in his career. The record, in fact, unites in unprecedented fashion certain frontier-rock impulses with the electro-ambient digressions typical of the Californian: bass, guitar and harmonica, the latter played by Roach himself, create a stretched-out harmonic fabric made alien by the ambient carpet beneath it. We are deep in "desert sound" territory, but alienated through a game of distorting mirrors, able to create an engaging, original stylistic spectrum that is anything but predictable. The album is further proof of the Californian's artistic versatility, capable of adapting his soundscapes even to worlds musically very far removed from his own, although, on the whole, it remains distant from the visionary poetics of his finest work.

The Roach of these years is a sonic experimenter, an innovator, and the undisputed protagonist of the entire ambient scene, able to keep an extremely high standard across almost all of his output and to confirm his status as the forerunner of the entire movement. In the period that follows, with the dawn of the new millennium, there would be a genuine explosion of creativity, leading the musician to churn out a myriad of records, as well as to develop and theorize the frontier of ambient-trance: across many of these works - to be divided evenly between experimental pieces that pushed the potential of his trancedelic path, nostalgic works harking back to the enduring formula theorized on The Magnificent Void, flirtations with multimedia art forms, and collaborations of the most varied flavors - the Californian would manage to maintain the incredible quality of his late-90s output and further confirm himself as one of the most important ambient musicians of all time.

The incredible prolificacy with which Roach would hit the market (roughly 3-4 albums of new material per year) would occasionally lead him to produce minor works in terms of depth, inspiration and importance. Nevertheless, much of the music press would brand almost all of his output as static, repetitive, self-referential and overly anchored to clichés that never evolved: this is a narrow, superficial view, most likely dictated by inattentive listening to music that is anything but immediate, as well as by no small amount of prejudice.

Ambient-trance and the meeting with Vir Unis (1999-2000)

At the dawn of the new millennium, Roach reaches the milestone of twenty years in the business: years in which he first managed to revolutionize the aesthetics and coordinates of ambient music, launching his various interpretations of it, and then gathered the modern conception of its purest, quintessential form into a unified treatise. Dreamtime Return and The Magnificent Void are essential albums, true milestones of the genre and of music as a whole, works that cemented a legend and that alone could grant the Californian the status of the leading ambient figure of the post-Eno era. But Roach's journey – contrary to what part of the music press has claimed – is anything but over.

1999 is the first year in which the creative ferment announced earlier truly takes hold: no fewer than ten albums credited to Steve Roach come out, between compilations, remasters, solo projects and collaborations. Opening the final twelve months of the millennium is the second chapter of the The Lost Pieces saga, titled Truth & Beauty. The album gathers outtakes from both tribal Roach (“Fall Of The Moai”, “Before The Sacrifice”) and cosmic Roach – “Aftermath”, “The Unreachable (Again)” – without skipping the usual surprise: two tracks dating back to the Quiet Music period, marked by an acoustic, delicate lyricism rarely shown before. “Earthman” and “Fate Awaits” are the two standouts of an enjoyable collection that, overall, adds little to what was already known. The same can be said of the saga's later chapters, genuine diaries stuffed with gems for collectors' delight.

After the remastered editions of The Dream Circle and Stormwarning put out by Timeroom, comes the long-awaited successor to The Magnificent Void: Atmospheric Conditions continues in a similar direction, focusing on dark drone odysseys across five long suites and further scaling back the grandiloquence of the arrangements, never so close to pure new age. “Underground Clouds Over A Secret Grosso” layers invisible streams of synth lines, which converse silently without ever exchanging any particular warmth, while in the two halves of “In The Heart Of Distant Horizon” a faint, livid light illuminates boundless expanses, utterly deserted in the first part and gradually set into motion in the second. Closing things out is the dark “Two Rivers Dreaming”, where the pathos seems to suffer, however, from a certain lack of human feeling, in favor of an excessive, almost artificial chill.

Atmospheric Conditions would like to push beyond the boundaries of the cosmos of The Magnificent Void, but ultimately ends up groping in the dark. Still, it's a courageous, far from immediate album, though in truth quite distant from the new turn Roach has in him.

A far more effective product of this same “meditative” trend is the third collaboration alongside vidnaObmana, initially released in a limited edition by Projekt under the title Ascensions Of Shadow, before being remastered in 2005 and taking on the name of the long suite that makes it up, Somewhere Else. Here, scenarios similar to those of Atmospheric Conditions are “warmed up” by the Belgian's existentialist atmospheres, which step in to fill the gaps of Roach's (here more effective) whispered formula. What we get is thus an hour-and-a-quarter-long dreamlike symphony, in which – as already happened before – the two understand each other perfectly, though Serries's leadership over the whole project is plain to see.

Somewhere Else temporarily closes the circle on the Californian's atmospheric ambient work: the trance turn is just around the corner, and with it a surprising and fundamental change of direction.

Four months later, Roach launches a new, important partnership, sharing his ambitions with John-Strate Hootman, aka Vir Unis, a soundtrack composer and experimenter whose mission has always been to tackle ambient material through the lens of technology. In that same period, in a completely different scene, the rave party craze has long since faded, replaced by a resurgence of nightclubs, which manage to win back a huge chunk of the audience, achieving a success almost greater than that of the notorious 80s. This new trend sets off a proliferation of scenes, and the success of genres quite different from one another, such as eurodance, the more melodic strain of techno (a variation on the original, already mutated within the rave scene) and trance music. And, just a few years after the ambient-techno fusion pioneered by the likes of Aphex Twin, Autechre and Boards Of Canada, the new alchemy comes precisely from the Roach-Unis duo and their first offspring.

Body Electric fuses the sinuous rhythms and textures of trance aesthetics with the canons of modern ambient, and stands as the foundation stone of a trend that will, once again, be followed by many others. It's a revolution on every front: farewell to suites – replaced by eleven tracks, only two of which come close to the ten-minute mark – and no more atmospheric odysseys; in their place comes a futuristic, hyper-technological sound, built on a rhythmic groove that is at times intrusive and aggressive, alternating with moments of greater stillness, entirely synthetic, over which Roach intervenes with sharp, cold, robotic electronic shockwaves.

The tribal experience is reworked here in the name of sonic perfection, cleanliness and synthesis: “Born Of Fire” is its fullest embodiment, in its hypnotic percussive stride, with an almost trip-hop rhythm. “Pure Expansion” and “Homunculus Within” continue to stir the mass, devoid of melody or any emotional touch: drum machines are the undisputed rulers of the scene here, able to ramp up rhythm and tension to the point of edging close to the purest techno (“Mind Link”) or to Aphex-Twin-style IDM (“Synaptic Gap”).

Elsewhere, harsh, oblique dissonances seem to want to offer a second interpretation of the cosmos (“Gene Pool”, “Solar Tribe”) or of earthly visions (“Cave Of The Heart”), while nostalgia for the past is confined exclusively to the melodic wall of “Bloodstreaming” and the modern pulses of “The New Dream”.

Body Electric presents us with the Roach of the third millennium, once again distanced from the canonical ambient he himself helped shape, and busy updating its rules to a new trend, one that, for the first time, almost stands in opposition to his own. The album is a fundamental building block for the sonic and conceptual development of ambient-trance, although in places it suffers from a clear excess of ambition, resulting in a sound that is almost too “artificial” and built more to the measure of its intentions than out of pure inspiration.

But the Californian's undertaking has really only just begun: a month later – preceded by the long-awaited first CD edition of the three Quiet Music albums, gathered onto a single disc – the in some ways extreme experience of Body Electric finds its natural home in the masterpiece Light Fantastic, the true manifesto of ambient-trance. From the experience with Unis remain the electro-percussive textures, whose coldness is nonetheless tempered by the warm embrace of synthesizers, finally back in the spotlight. The tracks stretch out again, and the opening of “Trip The Light” seems to set off well aware of its predecessor's percussive textures: the ray of light soon arrives, though, embodied by the advancing melody that slowly blankets and merges with the rhythm, growing even more rarefied in the modern journey through the cosmos that is “Breathing The Pulse”. The complementary “The Reflecting Chamber” and “Touch The Pearl” first indulge in solitary sound-effect play, before channeling it with the support of an irrepressible rhythm, which instead steps aside for the ten minutes of “Realm The Refraction”, only to resurface – quiet and almost understated – in the languid finale of “The Luminous Return”, a quarter of an hour of sharp atonal blades and subterranean pulsations.

Just as Dreamtime Return had kicked off modern ambient, Light Fantastic launches an equally fundamental trend, acting as a connecting tunnel between the world of ambient and that of EDM, with trance as the go-between. A masterpiece rich in nuance and far deeper than it might appear, it is without doubt his best album to date alongside Dreamtime Return and The Magnificent Void, as well as the last to offer substantial innovation of real relevance to the history of the genre.

From this point on, in fact, the Californian's path will no longer veer toward new shores, but will focus on researching and developing the routes already charted, including through the introduction of new elements, splitting each of his numerous releases among the various facets of his creativity.

The Creative Explosion (2000-2003)

The previously hinted-at surge in productivity will take shape with the arrival of the new millennium, from which point he will begin churning out an impressive mass of work, all devoted to the evolution of previously theorized languages, much of it alongside both "historic" and "new" names. His discographic paths will also split in two: the musician will keep releasing some of his work under his own Timeroom imprint (these will generally be the least successful), while the more important ones will carry forward his relationship with Projekt, for whom Roach will become a true flagship artist, inspiring the label's output and collaborating with names such as Loren Nerell and Erik Wøllo.

Kicking off the new millennium is the renewed partnership with Mexican artist Jorge Reyez, for the album Vine ~ Bark & Spore, a muted collection of ancestral rituals, percussion and ethnic remnants.

Shortly after, Roach instead returns to tread the path of intimate, acoustic ambient already explored on Atmospheric Conditions, releasing Early Man, a gift for the select few in a limited edition of five hundred copies. The album would be remastered the following year by Projekt with the addition of a second disc, and would go on to become one of the "classics" of the new millennium: its fully achieved purpose is to carry the textures of The Magnificent Void from outer space down to Earth's atmosphere. Contact with new age here becomes almost a marriage, and the grandeur of the work lies entirely in the long rides of the dark "Early Dawn" and the picturesque title track, twenty-five minutes of the most "human" Roach heard since the days of Quiet Music.

In the reluctant magma of the brief "Begins Look Skyward" and "Flow Stone" lurk effervescent, polished drones, while "Walking Upright" winds through patterns not far from early vidnaObmana's industrial, and "Hunting & Gathering" harks back to his recent trance drift thanks to its ever-pulsing rhythmic heart.

Early Man is one of Steve Roach's most intimate and quiet albums, as well as the continuation of an ever-evolving creative process.

Carrying forward a discourse closer to "classic" ambient is instead Midnight Moon, released the same year on Projekt and essentially an update of his sound sculptures to the trends of the new millennium (glitch above all). The structure is borrowed from The Magnificent Void, with three long tracks alternating with shorter, more concise fragments. The nemesis of "Ancestors Circle" tells of the journey back into space after the earthly explorations of the previous two albums, as do the muffled, pseudo-acoustic reminiscences of "Moon And Star", the disturbed, almost glitchy drones of "Deadwood" and the oblique nods to the Eno/Budd duo on "Hope". "Broken Town", meanwhile, offers us ten minutes of pure guitar-processing, its melody winding sinuously between melancholy and darkness, while the complementary "Midnight Loom" and "Later Phase" once again move between guitar treated deep in lunar soil and disturbed drones à-la-Oval.

Midnight Moon presents us, in full, with the Roach of the new millennium, keeping pace with the times and miles away from sounding predictable or repetitive. His is music capable of withstanding time and evolving in countless ways, thus managing to progress without disowning itself.

Less sharply focused is his attempt to revisit the tribal ambitions of Origins and Artifacts, which results in a collaboration with percussionist Byron Metcalf on the album The Serpent's Liar. Though born under good auspices, the record gets lost in the total dominance of percussion, too prominent and "natural" to approach the ambient-trance of Light Fantastic, and too present to work as a sonic backdrop. The result isn't far from that of the two, dreadful "tribal" albums, where the electronics settle into the background, acting as mere set dressing to make room for Metcalf's boundless fury and his swirling rhythms, rarely able to vary or surprise. Roach, for his part, seems uninterested in finding any kind of "new" solution that might breathe fresh life into the compositions. The double-album structure - which gathers work produced over years of meetings and sessions - and the overall length of nearly two hours don't help The Serpent's Liar reach the runway, from which its fifteen tracks instead keep well clear.

After taking part in the intriguing Prayers To The Protector - a collection of prayers by Tibetan monk Thupten Pema Lama set to music by the artist in minimalist form, and his last appearance for the historic Fortuna label - and the second and final offspring alongside Vir Unis - the lackluster Blood Machine, a tepid rehash of what had already been heard on Body Electric - in 2001 Roach returns to working in the visual realm with a work titled Time Of The Earth: A Desert Dreamtime Journey, consisting of a film of assembled, blended images on the theme of the desert, accompanied by a soundtrack composed specifically for the occasion, which would be released as an album two years later.

The return to a purely musical dimension comes with the excellent Core, which carries forward the ambient-trance formula under the banner of a digital, futuristic sound. Plain examples of this are the collage of rhythmic waves in the beautiful, crystalline "Endorphin Dreamtime" and the rhythmic leaps of the overture of "Way Of Now", in which the Californian's spaceship seems to turn into a time machine and cross the border of the present.

In some tracks, the trancedelic strain takes almost total control over the ambient one: the two halves of "So It Goes..." and "Wing Of Icarus" thus devote themselves to lively, uptempo electronics, without however setting aside the classic dense, layered melodic textures. On "Train Of Thought" the beat slows down, veering in the first half toward a livid, carnal trip-hop and recalling, in the second, the slow-rhythm glories of Dreamtime Return; shrouded in darkness, the same features reappear in the second half of "Core Meditation", while the subterranean structures of the first half of "Core Meditation" and the damp, rarefied fog of the closing "Indigo Yeaming" immerse themselves in the purest, deepest ambient.

Picking up an original, modern discourse once again, Core marks a further step toward a futuristic, ultra-modern sound.

Equally successful, though more rooted in his classic sound, is Streams & Currents, released the same year as the ideal successor to Midnight Moon: while the latter seemed to emphasize a modern reading of ambient, on this new work the undisputed protagonists are melody and tradition, as shown by the massive increase in acoustic instrumentation. The tracks stretch out once again, and with them the search for pathos and suggestion: on "Spirit Moves", ancestral percussion and dreamlike melodies intertwine for almost half an hour, moving through tougher passages and smooth descents alike in an emotional up-and-down that skillfully cradles the listener throughout. And dreaminess is also the key word for the shorter pieces that open and close the album: elegant and massive in the deflagrating drones of "Present Moment", intimate and almost shy in the brief farewell of the tangible "Ebb" and the silent "Flow". In between, the smooth, polished quarter-hour of "Slow Rising" and the leaden melancholy of the touching "Almost Touching", which seem to draw on the earthbound atmospheres of Atmospheric Conditions and Early Man.

Streams & Currents lingers on the melodic side of Roach's ambient work, without isolating itself from the human dimension as happened on Early Man, but rather marrying and blending it with cosmic textures and an earthly atmosphere.

After the last offering of 2001 – the pointless mixed compilation Pure Flow – the following year opens with the arrival of the third official collaboration alongside vidnaObmana – if we exclude the parenthesis of Circles & Artifacts, a sonic backdrop for an exhibition by photographer Martina Veroheven, and Live Archive, document of a performance that is neither particularly interesting nor original. InnerZone is one of the harshest and most experimental products in both artists' careers, further intensifying the industrial veins already present on the previous Cavern Of Sirens. The environment is coated in black pitch, evident in the primordial, tangible drones of "At The Edge Of Everything", in the gloomy alien dance of "Strands" – a dark-noise transposition of ambient-trance – in the sinister void of "Encounter Passage" and in the calm chaos of "Spires", where the ambience is sprinkled with shrill, cutting samples, before the apocalyptic close of the title track, whose slow, hypnotic rhythm carries the listener into a sick, terrifying dimension.

On InnerZone, Roach and Serries arm themselves with courage, attempting a turn toward pure experimentation and abandoning any form of cliché; nevertheless, the two fail to carve into the record's scorching wounds the atmosphere of their best work.

The brief excursion outside their usual canons continues on the following Trance Spirits – conceived together with composer Jeffrey Fayman, with Robert Fripp as a luxury guest on his frippertronics – and split evenly between tribal memories ("The Calling"), rituals (the title track), trance-delic episodes ("Seeker" and "Year Of The Horse") and renewed overpowerings of rhythm and percussion with electronics reduced to mere backdrop ("Taking Flight" and "In The Same Blue Water", respectively the overture and the farewell).

Overall, the album neither adds to nor takes away from what had already emerged previously, offering a "deluxe" listen that is more compelling for its line-up than for the actual music.

Shortly afterward, Roach reissues on disc the soundtrack to the audiovisual work Time Of The Earth, remastering the tracks and republishing them under the title Day Out Of Time. The various pieces are linked by the theme of the desert, revisited after the earlier takes of Western Dreams and Desert Solitaire. The rarefaction of Atmospheric Conditions intersects with the experimentation of InnerZone, producing what is perhaps the Californian's first true album that can be fully classified as dark-ambient. Unease and desolation pervade most of the tracks, from the (once again) industrial reverberations of "Underground Clouds" to the oblique drones driven by subterranean pulses of "Walking Upright", passing through the fearsome breathing of "Two Rivers Dreaming" and the macabre, solemn openings of "Begins Looking Skywards" and "This Life". A few pale rays of light instead emerge from the pure tribal rhythms of "True West", the melancholic architectures of "The Eternal Expanse" and the whispered melodic cycles of the minimal closing "The Return" (in no way connected to the similarly titled closer of Dreamtime Return), true glimmers in a darkness that the propitiatory rite of "The Holy Dirt" and the lukewarm symphony of "Merciful Eyes" fail to soften.

Day Out Of Time once again offers an evolution of clearly experimental stamp, without however slipping into the excesses of InnerZone, and thus proves to be a solid, compact work, despite a perhaps excessive length and the (predictable) loss of expressive power in the absence of its visual component. In 2012, on the tenth anniversary of its original pressing by Timeroom, the album was remastered by Projekt, with a DVD included in the packaging containing the original film in its full version.

To close out the year, there's room for two more albums: the first is Darkest Before Dawn, an ideal continuation of the discourse begun with Day Out Of Time and a return to the single-suite format, once again running roughly an hour and fifteen minutes. It's a work once again marked by a dark atmosphere, though closer this time to drone sculpture than to its predecessor's desolate experimentation, drawing strength instead from a grandiloquence, formal perfection and evocative power that are once again excellent, even if here and there a few tired moments creep in.

The second is All Is Now, a double album that on one side collects various excerpts and samples used during performances in the United States, and on the other documents one such performance – held in Sedona – in its entirety, revisiting the futurist ambient-trance of Core, the dreamlike intimacy of Early Man, the jagged industrial veins of InnerZone and the fusion of canonical ambient, modernity and melody found on Streams & Currents. Though it fails to match the stratospheric results of Stormwarning and On This Planet, the album does an excellent job of conveying the appeal of the musician's live shows.

The ambient architect continues on his path of variety and constant renewal, even if this no longer goes hand in hand, as it once did, with innovation and the launching of new trends. Without any longer astonishing with particular novelties, Roach's exploration does not stop and is in fact continually expanding, ready to let itself be further influenced and to flirt with a myriad of new sonorities, or more simply to renew its past glories by placing emphasis on an ever-different character of the various styles he has embodied over the years.

Sacredness, Melancholy and Experimentation (2003-2006)

The following five years will proceed more or less along the same lines as the post-Light Fantastic period, with the Californian devoted to updating his clichés and experimenting on them by embracing stylistic currents of various kinds, eventually arriving at a marriage with the multimedia art of the Immersion project.

The year 2003 is marked by a reduction in output, and within it only the four parts of a brand-new project take shape: Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces. The new world Roach approaches across the two albums in the series is sacred music, though devoted to paganism and pure esotericism. Most likely influenced by the knowledge of other artists in the Projekt "circle", such as Alio Die and Michael Laird, the project consists of two albums, released about two months apart: the first, simply titled Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces Parts 1 & 2, is one of the longest works ever produced by the Californian, as well as a "new" union of extended pieces (which blend together in the first part) and shorter episodes. On Part 1, humanism and evocative power merge, taking on an entirely new esoteric charge, translated into the twenty minutes of expansive atmosphere of "Oracle", into the candid flow of "Vortex Ring", into the pure church-ambient of the muffled "Within The Mystic" and the understated "Presence", and into the solemn architecture of the splendid "Palace Of Nectar". The discourse continues on Part 2, though taking on a more strictly descriptive character: thus "Wren And Raven" acts as a bridge toward visionary new-age readings ("The Otherworld", "Wonderworld", "Slowly Dissolve"), rare depictions of apocalyptic scenarios ("Soulwave", "Womb Of Night") and genuine liberating prayers ("Thereshold", "Wordless") that pull the listener into equally paradisiacal settings (the respectively following "Dream Body" and "Nameless").

In the second chapter of the saga, Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces Parts 3 & 4, the discourse develops in a more strictly sacred fashion: whereas in the first two parts, and especially the second, Roach had positioned himself as a painter of frescoes and canvases, in the remaining two quarters of the work the musician lets the more abstract side of the imagination guide the proceedings, reproducing themes and sensations without the mediation of imagery. Thus a third part is born, dreamlike and gentle, carried at times by stretched-out, placid drones (the rarefied "Personal Nature", the semi-tangible "Open Heart", the grandiloquent "The Spiral Of Time's Fire Burns On" and "This Moment Is Another Memory") and at others by slowly and constantly shifting sound masses ("This Moment Is A Memory", "Tuning Back") or by dreamlike, graceful flows (the dreamy "Turn To Light", the evocative "Slightly Below" and "Essence Of Phaedra", the melancholic "Left Perfectly Alone"). The fourth part, meanwhile, is entirely occupied by "Piece Of Infinity", one of the "classic" hour-and-a-quarter suites that stands as a liturgy of eternal meaning, able to interpret and merge the mood of all three other parts of the work, ranging from long intimate progressions to solemn sections, passing through tense interludes and crescendo-driven preludes.

Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces is probably – alongside the subsequent Immersions – the most ambitious and successful project in Roach's entire career: able to offer more than six straight hours of music without the slightest sign of flagging, devoid of particularly original flashes of inspiration but also free of lesser moments, it's the strongest candidate to disprove the thesis of those who, as early as 2003, branded the Californian's art as static and stagnant. An art still capable of proving influential, so much so that it inspired the mystical turn taken by champions of the new ambient scene such as J Arif Verner and Max Corbacho.

The other releases of the year are two compilations – the mixed anthology Space And Time and the lackluster collage of live tracks and remixes Life Sequence – and the third chapter of the The Lost Pieces saga, titled Texture Times. The latter once again picks up unreleased and interesting fragments, such as the quiet “Grey And Purple”, the triptych of “Spiral Triptych” and “Soul Light”, all outtakes from the “acoustic” strand of Roach's music.

The successful series will come to a close the following year with the fourth and final chapter, Places Beyond.

2004 opens with the fourth collaborative work with Dirk Serries: Spirit Dome is perhaps the weakest result the two have achieved together, a long single-track sonic flow that continues the experimental isolation of the previous InnerZone, stripping away melody and devoting itself to the form of ambience, that is, the most concrete and difficult strand of new age, where the undisputed protagonists are the sounds of nature (waterfalls, rain, wind) and early field recordings. This is music whose usual purpose is to guide meditation sessions, and outside that context it often turns out – as is the case here too – repetitive and fairly pointless in itself.

The “spiritual” journey continues in the planned Fever Dreams trilogy, in which his ambient music once again merges with folk traditions. The first, self-titled chapter of this new saga cunningly blends remnants of the more classic Roach with percussion, digeridoo and various traditional instruments, managing after a long time to avoid looking out of place or falling flat, while further riding a trend that had completely died out with the arrival of the new millennium.

In the second installment, titled Holding The Space, and the third, Fever Dreams III – which will see the light three years later – the formula won't change in the slightest, and will end up sounding flat and predictable. The trilogy represents, in all likelihood, the lowest point of Roach's 2000s output, and perhaps the only one truly devoid of novelty and, in some ways, of purpose.

To close out the year, the formula of Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces is revisited in Mantram, once again composed alongside Byron Metcalf, this time with the participation of one of the gurus of the American new-world scene, oboist Mark Seelig. The result is yet another hour-and-a-quarter-long suite, which this time, however, presents itself as a sort of genuine mantra, embracing Eastern tradition and drawing on the most mystical side of German kosmische music (that of, among others, the late Florian Fricke's Popol Vuh). The result is an album steeped in emotional tension and excellently produced, where Roach plays a decidedly more important role than he did on Spirit Trances, lending his sonic odysseys the visionary force of the “cinematic” Metcalf and the delicate melodic sweetness of Seelig.

2005 is something of a sabbatical year for the Californian, who focuses much of his attention on the Projekt-produced remaster of the masterpiece Dreamtime Return. For the occasion, Roach goes all out: alongside the regular edition, a deluxe edition is also released under the name The Dreamtime Box, which pairs the new edition of the unforgettable treatise with two discs of unreleased material, later also published separately. The first of these, Possible Planet, launches into experiments blending his darkest soundwork with musique concrète, channeling the results into three long, forbidding suites of pure dark ambient. Halfway between Sleep Research Facility and the concrete explorations of the avant-garde scene, it's once again a work that turns experimentation into a cry, but ultimately proves too forbidding and ambitious, with a consequent loss of atmosphere. The other disc included in the box set, New Life Dreaming, draws instead more heavily on melodic-acoustic ambient, packing a myriad of emotions into the melancholy of its five short suites (about a quarter of an hour each) and returning with even greater vigor to the glories of Quiet Music.

The move into multimedia and the “immersions” (2006-2008)

The following year marks the start of a new frontier in Steve Roach's art: with the Immersion project, the Californian steps into the world of multimedia art, just as Brian Eno had already done with his video-sound installations. This is a Roach who is ever more modern and in step with the times, just three years shy of the thirtieth anniversary of the start of his career, who will continue his exploration on the musical front as well, while at the same time more and more musicians will embark on projects owing a considerable debt to his work (chief among them the standard-bearers of the Kranky label and the transcendent Eluvium).

The first offspring of the series, Immersion: One, is conceived by Roach himself as “a sonic flow in perfect symbiosis with the living world”. In some ways, it's a return to the original conception of ambient music as music in harmony with its surrounding environment: the latter, however, needs to be specifically studied and designed, since each individual piece has different characteristics, just as every environment does. And so the audio-video project is born, one that no longer limits itself to composing music able to adapt to the image, but instead gives rise to an equal partnership, where each element complements the other.

Yet another iteration of the long-suite formula, Immersion: One is for the first time situated in a purely metaphysical realm: while Dreamtime Return interpreted abstract languages through the canons of the living world, this new composition – a quiet, subterranean, almost minimal flow lasting seventy-five minutes – is the counterpart to images that are themselves indeterminate, formed by the alternation of colors, lights and shadows. Even so, the distinctiveness of the operation is only fully visible in performances where the visual backdrop is projected onto giant screens, since no video component is included in the releases of this or subsequent albums.

Immersion: One marks the beginning of a new frontier in Roach's journey, from an artistic-conceptual standpoint more than a strictly musical one, further proof of the ongoing evolution of his research.

The cosmic vein of The Magnificent Void and its successors returns to the fore – after the detours devoted to the sacred, the intimate and the experimental – on Terraform, an album Roach conceives together with one of Projekt's most active and talented ambient composers, Canadian Loren Nerell. The record evokes sublunar landscapes, adapting them to his recent acoustic intimism, and across its four suites manages to stand as one of the best products of post-trance Roach, as well as perhaps the sharpest of his experimental offspring.

Thus “Cavity Of Liquids” is the Californian's “classic” cascade of magnetic drones, rounded out by Nerell's finely chiseled glitch disturbances, and “Texture Wall” picks up the same theme, adding an almost industrial metallic screech. The menacing “Ecopoiesis”, on the other hand, travels paths of purely cosmic origin, evoking the Tangerine Dream of “Atem”, while “Paraterra” – almost a Nerell solo piece – immerses itself in a dark ambient streaked here and there with subtle glitches.

Terraform is a complex, multifaceted record, guaranteed to be anything but an easy listen, but one that manages to seep in deep over time, while finally reaping the full rewards of the bold exploration found on late-period Roach.

After a solid live outing at the classic NEARfest, the following Proof Positive brings ambient-trance impulses back into fashion, almost entirely abandoning ambient in favor of a rhythm-and-melody combination with an all-too-retro flavor. So while the twenty minutes of "Westwind" feel like an endless prelude to a rhythmic explosion that never arrives, "Living In The Pulse" and "Essential Occurrence" are analog marches that seem to come straight out of the '70s, somewhere between Jean-Michel Jarre, Klaus Schulze and Vangelis. "Adreno Stream" recycles the exact same rhythm as "Westvind", and the title track carries on for thirty-two minutes of murky, eventually tedious ups and downs, needlessly saccharine and verging on the most full-blown new age of the likes of Gandalf and Ray Lynch.

A few months later, the DVD Kairos: The Meeting Of Time And Destiny documents a new multimedia experiment, where the music is represented by a flow of cyclical structures that shift color as a note or rhythm changes. The project's weak point, however, lies in its musical side, a genuine recycling of recent work that adds nothing to what we've already heard and seems content to fulfill, with minimal effort, the task of accompanying the visual show. Overall, the project doesn't come close to matching the success of Immersions, though it remains the only permanent record of Roach's multimedia explorations.

The latter, meanwhile, is enriched a year later by two new chapters, which will also be Roach's only releases that year, alongside one new album. In Immersion: Two the conceptual premise shifts: the goal now is to create music "that can fill the voids of inactive spaces." The formula stays the same, but the sound is further stripped down and quieter than in the first installment: the sonic flow moves slowly, filling every space and occupying every patch of silent surface, making imperceptible variations and abstracting itself entirely from the physical dimension. The visual counterpart unfolds alongside the sound, saturating linear and non-linear structures as the minutes pass, pixel by pixel, completing the "puzzle" right as the performance ends.

The third and contemporaneous chapter, Immersion: Three, reconnects the human dimension to the music, which here is meant to "serve as a backdrop for any activity, whether working, studying or relaxing." The format changes too: no longer a single seventy-five-minute suite, but three of them spread across as many CDs, for almost five consecutive hours of music. The first, "First Light", moves through the emotional undergrowth so dear to Thom Brennan, growing ever stronger and more intense, evoking the first light of dawn. The following "Sleep Chamber" goes in the opposite direction, dominated by a dark aura that gradually fades away. The closing "Still" stays on a similar path, letting the occasional glimmer of light filter through the dark blanket surrounding it.

In the two new installments of Immersions, Roach continues his personal ride through the reinterpretation of the concept of ambient music, viewed from an ever-different angle and fused with the medium of video into a genuine single entity. It's not a revolution, but yet another step forward, further proof of a creativity in constant surplus, a talent incapable of fading, and a search increasingly geared toward a plurality of languages.

2007 also closes out with the first true solo project since Proof Positive. Arc Of Passion is a kind of trait d'union between the paths the Californian has followed in recent years: there's the cosmic-sacred in the twenty minutes of synthetic openings on "Moment Of Grace", there are the Schulze-indebted sequencer vistas that evolved from ambient-trance across the two halves of the title track, and there's the cosmic-concrete claustrophobia of the recent collaborations with Serries. It is, however, a transitional record, one that seems to pause for a moment to sharpen its tools after years of work and to firmly restate concepts already well established in the past: though once again marked by now-customary sonic perfection, it's a minor work of lesser stature compared to earlier efforts, nostalgic and harmless.

The true protagonists of the 2006-2008 period are, without a doubt, multimedia interactions, a frontier on which Roach appears to have invested most of his energy during this period: further proof of this lies in the small number of releases compared to the musician's more recent standards, and in the fact that three of the five works belong precisely to the "multimedia" Immersions series. It amounts to a kind of closing of the circle opened by the conceptual revolution of Dreamtime Return: Roach is now free to work as a true sound designer, shaping his sonic architectures and the visual environments in which to place them with complete freedom.

The adventure with Erik Wøllo and variations on a theme (2008-2012)

In the years following 2008, the artist will withdraw for good from the role of innovator: instead, he will focus on continually developing the paths he's already laid out, through which he will nonetheless keep producing original, idea-rich work, much of which stands on its own in his history. This phase, however, will also see the arrival of a few lesser records and a gradual reduction in new releases, which will settle back down to two albums a year.

2008 opens with the solid A Deeper Silence, yet another work structured as a single suite, heavily indebted, in its dark-ethereal atmospheres, to the Immersions series and the collaborations with Serries. Yet in the flow of its compact sonic stream, it's impossible not to notice an evident rehash of a settled, fossilized formula, the same one that, from The Magnificent Void onward, fully fits the definition of ambient, so much so that it's now common to nearly every current exponent of the genre. The following Landmass attempts to shake things up by injecting a heavy dose of sonic disturbance and leaning more heavily on the growing ambient-drone scene: the experiment doesn't pay off, though, delivering a record far removed from "classic" Roach and unable to hold up against younger contemporaries.

Far more successful, on the other hand, is the second product of the collaboration with Byron Metcalf and Mark Seelig: Nada Terma is a genuine neoclassical ambient symphony, steeped in mysticism and esoteric touches, that revisits from a different angle the relationship with the sacred explored across the four chapters of Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces. Percussion steps aside in the first half of the album, leaving the warm embrace of synthetic strings to guide the sonic canvases: these embrace an evocative paganism in the languor of the first movement and an apocalyptic crescendo in the second, before reaching catharsis in the darkness of the third. The remaining half of the album, meanwhile, sees rhythm gradually come to the fore: hypnotic and timid in the prayer of the fourth movement, and an undisputed protagonist in the quarter-hour of arabesques of the fifth and in the scant twenty minutes of the seventh.

Nada Terma is, without a doubt, the finest result of Roach's ethno-tribal side across thirty years of career, able to fuse pagan tradition with the allure of sacred music. To date, it's the last offspring credited to the trio: the Californian and Seelig will meet again two years later for a two-man project.

But the real highlight of the Californian's latest career phase is his encounter with Erik Wøllo, the versatile, classically trained Norwegian composer who, midway through his career, was struck by the musical proposition of the new ambient. His unbreakable bond with rhythm takes center stage on Stream Of Thought, an album of a thousand faces in which the two improvise entirely and cast themselves outside any convention. The first thing to be overhauled is the record's structure: for the most part, it consists of very brief excursions into ever-different territories (19 in total, all untitled), including electronics stirred by techno impulses (parts four and five), echoes of languid mysticism guided by Wollo's guitar (the first and the ninth), forays into pure ambient-trance (the second, eleventh and sixteenth), and further fragmented, reassembled memories of the most canonical Roach (the ambient side on the third, fourth, seventh and fifteenth, and the electro-ethnic side on the sixth) or of Wøllo the experimenter (the twelfth, thirteenth and nineteenth — the longest track on the record at just under a quarter of an hour).

Dominating the album's atmosphere is, above all, the Norwegian, with Roach seeming almost to bow to the talent and skill of his "disciple," giving him free rein to put himself back in the game. Stream Of Thought is a kind of testament, in which master and pupil combine experience and creative force, achieving a result of the highest caliber that confirms the former's tireless drive to explore and the latter's crystalline talent.

2009, marking the thirtieth anniversary of Moebius, finds Roach producing some of the finest work of the new millennium, ranging between successful variations on his formula and a surprising detour. The first of these is Dynamic Stillness, a true immersion into dark ambient: taking up the double-album structure again, Roach creates one of the harshest and most experimental suites of his entire discography in the forty minutes of "Birth Of Still Places," the overture of the first disc: a serpentine coil of distortions and clinging sound effects that grants no respite whatsoever. The livid textures of "Long Tide" and the decadent expressionism of "A Darker Light" instead see him flirting with ambient-drone, before "Opening Sky" brings things back to more relaxed territory.

The restless soundscapes of "Nature Of Things" are instead tasked with opening the second disc, which then proceeds into a gallery of three long suites: the quarter-hour of refracted concretism of "Further Inside," the sublunary settings of "Slowly Revealed," and the ineffable field-recording conclusion of "Canyon Stilness."

Dynamic Stillness is one of the most complex and least accessible works in Roach's entire output: far from the placid flows of his canonical style and intent on brushing up against the shores of modern experimentation, it's Roach's thoroughly successful attempt to interpret that same territory with personality.

Shortly after, the Californian releases the fourth chapter of the Immersions project, titled Immersion: Four, which marks the return of the single-suite structure abandoned in the previous, third installment of the series. Across the hour and a quarter that makes up the work, Roach pushes even further toward ataraxia, conceiving the record as a stable sonic flow capable of being played in any environment, endlessly. The result is a sound even more ineffable than that of the previous chapters, one that seems to proceed without variation, flowing slowly without interruption.

Immersion: Four, while failing to match the freshness and inspiration of the previous chapters, carries on the high quality of the wonderful saga it belongs to, enriching it further.

The following Afterlight follows the same script as A Deeper Silence: using the same single-track model, Roach nonetheless manages to achieve a decidedly better result than that earlier work. Melody is absolute master over the slow flow of the sonic mass, held in check here and there only by natural samples, which increase its "meditative" component, drawing it closer to the contemporary new forms of American ambient dominated above all by the standard-bearers of the Kranky roster (Stars Of The Lid, Pan American, Loscil). The cover – one of the most beautiful of all Roach's albums – depicting a dark sky through which sunlight manages to find a gap, perfectly captures the mood of the record, which however lingers on that second element, with the "dark" matrix almost entirely set aside.

Afterlight is a nostalgic record, in some ways out of step with its time, which nonetheless manages to stand out for its ability to evoke great atmospheres with reduced, already well-worn means.

2009 closes with another excellent single-suite work, Destination Beyond. If its predecessor marked a nostalgic return to a melodic ambient close to new age, this new record experiments by slowing down and coating the ambient-trance formula in melody, drawing on the rhythmic constructions of Klaus Schulze's "Moondawn." Not too far removed from material conceived alongside Erik Wøllo, the album seeks and finds an alternative approach to rhythmic ambient, closing out a golden year for the Californian in the best possible way.

Roach's exploration of the sacred finds its ideal culmination in a concert held at Grace Cathedral in 2010, documented on the album Live At Grace Cathedral, released that same year. Across the two long musical immersions, the musician revisits the core themes of his most recent output, fusing esotericism, gentle melancholy and depth, giving rise to a performance charged with emotional tension and atmosphere. The year's first studio work is instead the beautiful Sigh Of Ages, a genuine return to his most distant origins – the electro-ambient ones of World's Edge – and a world away from all his previous productions. The soundscape is dominated by melodic arpeggios, over which light, high-pitched flows are layered: there's no room here for the Californian's classic ambient grandiloquence, nor for the complex synthetic architectures that have become the trademark of the scene closest to him. Thus "Quelling Place" seems to come straight out of the experimental work of the duo Jansen/Barbieri, "The View From Here" offers an enormous leap back in time, retracing the minimalist paths of his very earliest work, while "Return Of The Majestic" flirts with electro-exotic structures closely recalling Michael Amerlan and his "Ascendences." In the quarter-hour of "Sentient Breath" a rarefied flow of icy drones covers and devours the melodic substrate, which frees itself and reveals its purity in the following "Morning Of Ages," before giving itself over to refractions and hypnosis in the closing "Longing To Be…"

Sigh Of Ages is a retro kaleidoscope that walks down roads the musician had previously left aside, filling a gap one probably wouldn't even have noticed, with an extremely high level of quality.

After the already-mentioned works alongside Metcalf and Seelig, and a predictable, "metallic" collaboration with explorer Brian Parnham for The Desert Inbetween – a static record anchored to the recent "avant-garde" exploits tackled alongside Dirk Serries – which opens 2011, Roach releases the fifth and, to date, final chapter of the Immersions series.

Immersion: Five – Circadian Rythms marks an abrupt shift from the setup that had previously characterized the saga's chapters, both musically and in terms of structure and concept. For the first time, an album in the series takes its title from a track and isn't presented in audio-visual form. The double album collects two maxi-suites – a form that in recent years seems to have become a fixed mode of expression for the Californian's art: the semi-title-track moves completely away from the quiet flow of the previous chapters, positioning itself halfway between post-cosmic rhythms and ambient-trance, while "Shroud Of Night" embraces the psycho-dronic constellations tackled in his recent experimental output.

Though deserving credit for the courage to vary a formula that skirts perfection, Immersion: Five – Cyrcadian Rythms is without a doubt the least successful product of the entire project, as well as something of a fish out of water compared to its predecessors.

The partnership with Erik Wøllo gains a second chapter with the arrival of The Road Eternal, a record that on one hand partly recovers a language closer to the Californian "master" compared to the surprising Stream Of Though, and on the other continues developing the latter's techno-rhythmic formula. In the twenty minutes of the title track we witness a return to the bliss of acoustic dreaminess, and the same atmospheres are painted in the brief watercolors of "First Twilight" and the closing "Night Strands," while "Depart At Sunrise" dives fully into ambient-trance territory, before giving way to the alluring techno pulses of "The Next Place" and the underground dub of "Travel By Moonlight."

The Road Eternal fails to astonish as much as its predecessor did, offering excellent productions that are nonetheless too stylistically disjointed from one another. It remains, in any case, a work of real substance, capable of winning appreciation even outside the ambient context.

To close out the year come two new live albums: the first — Live At SoundQuest Fest — mixes tribal leftovers with excerpts from his collaborations with Mark Seelig and Byron Metcalf, while the second turns out to be the document of a truly epochal performance.

Drawing on and building monumental architectures over a composition previously showcased on the beautiful On This Planet, Journey Of One stands as a genuine testament to thirty years of his career. Across the two multiform suites that make it up, every subtle interpretation the Californian has given his art over the years unfolds in sequence: the first half begins with pure sonic flows, moving toward tribal rhythms, passing through the sonic ambient of Dreamtime Return, the electronics of World's Edge and the electro-ethnic work released as Suspended Memories. In the second half, by contrast, the cosmic alienation of the opening minutes slowly dissolves into pure ambient-trance rhythms, before giving way to the sacred mysticism of Tibetan chants and, finally, to a placid isolation reminiscent of the Immersions, fading into a melody that leads directly into Afterlight.

Journey Of One contains the very best of Steve Roach's music: the defining traits of his revolutions, the nuances and facets of his recent research, and his more spontaneous digressions. It's a kind of hypothetical anthology that, rather than simply collecting previously released material, improvises new themes of the highest caliber within those same areas he has already explored and ridden before. It's one of the masterpieces of the artist and of ambient music as a whole.

Recent works (2012-2015)

In 2012 the musician devoted himself to restoring the beautiful Stormwarning and to a complete edition of Day Out Of Time, which pairs the audio disc with a Dvd containing the visual accompaniment — carrying over into the following year, 2013. After that come a handful of new works: the first is the vivid Groove Immersion, a fusion of ambient-trance rhythms and the tribal sonorities of the mid-90s. In the hour-and-a-quarter-long "Part 1" that makes up the whole album, the record reveals a soul torn between tension and magnetism, though without managing to be particularly astonishing.

Quite different in character is the following Back To Life, which returns to a rarefied, "disturbed" ambient sound and to the "tracks+suite" double-album structure. The dysfunctions surface at times in the form of a pulsing rhythm (the caustic quarter-hour humus of "Tranquillity Base"), at others through glitch inserts (the dark omens of "Cloud Cover", the fearsome grip of "The Wonder Of It All"), while elsewhere the shape hews closer to the cosmic explorations of The Magnificent Void, as in the languid flow of "Touchstones" or the epic drones of the splendid title track. Standing apart are the minimal, muffled atmospheres of "Everything Inside", the cyclical-melodic pastiche of "Where Rasa Lives" and the hour-plus of "Mist Of Perception", a genuine journey through the senses that takes up the entire second disc.

Back To Life is, to date, the Californian's last solo album, developing the tenets of ambient he had theorized almost twenty years earlier while still managing to hit the mark and captivate in remarkable fashion, much to the chagrin of the various detractors who have long insisted on branding the Californian's music as "all the same", "self-referential" and "static".

The year's final release marks the return, eight years after the dismal Spirit Dome, of his partnership with Dirk Serries — who has in the meantime dropped the vidnaObmana moniker. This isn't the only novelty that Low Volume Music brings with it: right from the title, the album seems to signal a substantial change of course in the dynamics of their collaboration. No more impenetrable walls of robotic drones, gone are the industrial dissonances and convergences: in their place, the paradigm of quiet par excellence — low volume. The result is an intimate, measured and in some ways minimal formula, close to the "humanist" Roach of Afterlight: a recipe that is perhaps a little clever, recycling clearly defined clichés with guaranteed emotional pull, but one that succeeds in quietly recounting, with gentle cradling, the resurrection of the duo's shared path. So "Here" opens under the banner of pure dream-logic, amid quiet flows and vibrating drones, before making room for the languid whispers of "Whisper" — the best embodiment of the concept expressed in its title — and for the more acoustic "Closed", which revisits the languor of early-nineties Serries. Maximum depth is reached, however, in the two closing mini-suites: "Bow" travels close to the cosmos, embracing both rarefaction and livid cycles à la Tim Hecker, while "Haze" recovers the fluid language of the most nostalgic Roach, chiseling out in a quarter of an hour a mix of melancholy, serenity and sensory peace.

Low Volume Music is an album that looks backward, managing to revive the duo's partnership in the simplest and most effective way possible. There's no renewal or experimentation here, and we're certainly not at the level of Roach's best post-2000 work: what remains is the exploitation of a sonic standard eternally bound to atmosphere, incapable of disappointing as much as it is of truly impressing.

In the final months of the year, the musician announces plans to release no fewer than three new works, all scheduled for the first part of 2013. The first to take shape is the fifth chapter alongside Byron Metcalf, which stakes an unambiguous claim as the best result the pair has achieved together. Having set aside their craving for rhythm and their passion for ritual music, the two set off in this Tales From The Ultra Tribe on an intriguing journey toward the quieter shores of tribal-ambient, with rhythm finally able to form a single whole with the electronic soundscapes. "Setting Forth" opens amid electrifying pulses and pragmatic syncopations, followed along the same lines by the unstable marathon of "Midnight Migration", where electronics are, surprisingly, the absolute master. Hypnosis reigns supreme, conjured by Roach's sinewaves, ready to welcome Metcalf and his rhythmic arsenal with open arms: the results can be admired first in "A Noble Direction" and then in "The Magma Clan", evocative interactions between tribal tradition and cosmic ambient. The dark side of this latter universe surfaces in the nocturnal dance of "Return Of The Dragon Bone Tribe", before dissolving into the melodic flows of "In The Safety Of Travel". Rounding out the spectrum is "Road From Here", the only true ritual-styled passage entrusted entirely to drums and bongos, ideally closed out by the brief ethereal coda of "Fire Sky Portal".

Tales From The Ultra Tribe marks the final (and somewhat belated) culmination, thirteen years after their first meeting, of the partnership with Byron Metcalf, as well as yet another triumph for a musician blessed with inexhaustible creativity.

A few weeks later, it's the turn of the first solo work of 2013. Soul Tones once again puts the focus on the art in which the Californian remains, to this day, the undisputed master: pure, cosmically-tinged ambient music. The very same strand whose historical center of gravity lay in the unsurpassed 1996 masterpiece The Magnificent Void, and which had received a fresh injection of vitality thanks to the multimedia Immersions series — the pinnacle of Roach's entire contemporary output. The album is made up entirely of two suites: the title track and "Resolved". Across the three-quarters of an hour of the first, Roach's now-classic sinewaves engage in a soft dialogue, progressively binding to and detaching from silence, plunging into a deep ocean only to resurface intermittently. The sounds grow more organic over the scant half-hour of the second, where the weave of flows becomes denser and tighter, almost as if to represent the attainment of the balance sought earlier.

Announced as the first chapter of a hypothetical trilogy on the exploration of the soul — linked in sound and concept but not presented as a "saga" — Soul Tones shows us a Steve Roach in dazzling form, intent on delivering yet another lesson in ambient music.

After the two gems with which he had marked the start of 2013, and the interlude of Rasa Dance — an album compiled from previously released material made alongside his wife Linda Kohanov on the theme of the bond between horses and human beings — the ambient music master, with the following Future Flows, delivers a kind of collage of much of his most unspoiled work, closely recalling what he did back in 2007 with Arc Of Passion. Precisely for this reason, the album ends up quoting itself more than usual, though without ever lacking the now-customary, extremely high quality. The cosmic dream of the opening "An Omnipresent Sense Prevails" and the dark spatial fresco of "Rapt In Night" thus pay more than one nod to fellow countrymen Michael Stearns and Michael Amerlan, marking yet another intersection between their fundamental sonic languages. The sovereign ataraxia of "Spectrum Of Change" and the livid candor of "Heart Of Light", on the other hand, touch on more purely drone-styled territory, ready to take on more colorful hues amid the whispered calls of "Air Meditation" and the choral sentinels of the closing "Regeneration Revelation". Rounding out the picture are the two long carpets of analog ups and downs of "The Texture Of Remembering" and, above all, "The Future Flows From Here", which nostalgically seek out the days of the never-sufficiently-appreciated "World's Edge".

Future Flows is probably the most transitional and varied album of the Californian's recent period, but that doesn't make it a work that contradicts the dazzling form he seems to have been in over the last five years.

In mid-2013 Roach sealed in Live Transmission a performance recorded at the SomaFM studios, just three days after his appearance at Ambicon, the celebratory festival for the historic and unforgettable Heart Of Space, which offered one of the rare chances to catch the Californian live. Released as a double CD on Projekt, the album doesn't boast any particular highlights or memorable moments, though it's not a bad effort overall. Telling in this sense are the twenty minutes of "In The Light Of Day" and the five minutes of its reprise "Kairos Portal", two suites with a distinct Schulze-esque aftertaste (the Schulze of early-2000s works) that nonetheless lose themselves in excessive loop usage. The very modest "Zone Of Drones" tries to fall back on dark drones without ever really touching anything, while the pair "Looking For Something"/"Reflecting Chamber" seeks and finds, with more success, contact respectively with the desert expanses of his "Californian" records and the tension of his latest works with vidnaObmana (not by chance credited, alongside Byron Metcalf, as a "sample provider"). The half-hour "Vortex Immersion" revisits "Kairos Portal" once more, this time stretching out the pacing and delaying the entrance of rhythm, in contrast to the more melancholic quarter-hour of "Westwind" and the floating expanses of "Today", which bring the soundworld back to a dimension closer to the boundless canvases Roach has accustomed us to.

Canvases that in Live Transmission struggle to match technical mastery with that evocative power in which Roach nonetheless remains unrivaled — a limitation probably also due to the "remote live" nature in which the album was born.

The following Spiral Meditations arrives towards the end of the year and surprisingly returns instead to plow the territories of that Berlin School from which the musician's adventure had originally taken off: as had happened three years earlier on Sigh Of Ages, what comes back to life here are electro-minimalist sonic textures, sequencer games, bows to the analog, interweaving rotating sinewaves and a certain taste for sonic vintage revivalism. The record is actually a flow divided into seven parts, each merging into the next as if to form a genuine spiral enigma, where the necessary construction of the concept ends up prevailing over atmosphere and undermining the spontaneity of the whole. "Consumed By Sunlight" lets a glimmer of stars triumph over the most classic night-sky backdrop, before "Sand Painting" openly pays homage to modern-day Schulze, followed on the same mission by the liquid "Helix". Elsewhere, the contact is with the rhythmic-melodic rides coined in the latest update of his ambient-trance: the voracious pulse of the title track runs at triple the speed of Light Fantastic, and its trail of vapor and wind takes the shape of "The Feeling Expands", before dying out in an intermittence closely recalling Robert Rich's "Numena" on "Sustained In Soul Light". Standing as a counterpoint to all this glittering are the twenty minutes of the second part of the title track, essentially a drone evolution that seems to foreshadow an explosion deferred until the transition to the next track. All of this sits at the center of a work that can only play a minor role within a vast production rich in gems like that of the Californian musician, even as it stands out as an attempt to break away from the usual ambient clichés.

Closing out the year comes a one-two of archive live recordings pulled from the musician's vaults: both dated 2000, these are Live In Tucson alongside Jorge Reyez (digital-only) and At The Edge Of Everything, a recording of one of Roach's very rare non-American performances, at the E-Live Festival in Eindhoven. Listening to the sounds offered across the hour and a half of the performance, and the clear emphasis placed on ambient-trance sonorities with added tribal influences, it's not hard to place it in the context of the Light Fantastic tour. The stylistic boundaries are laid out from the very start in the harsh quarter-hour of visceral percussion and digeridoo of "The Edge Opens", an introduction to an immersive journey that continues after entering the unhealthy antechamber of "Serpents Rebirth", a self-contemplation stretched out over ten interminable minutes. "Hyperpassage" soon begins playing with arpeggiators and analog filters until the Californian's classic sonic expanses try to add a bit of color. Decidedly more successful are the teeming carpet of "Cloudwatching With The Trancemaker" and the alien tribalism of the brief "Crossroads Of Three", while the touch of desert class in the closing "Refractions Of Remembering" patches up the forced change of scenery brought on by the cosmic plunge of "Apparition Celebration". A live experience as impeccable as ever, but on a musical level — with excessive stylistic variety also playing a part — perfection this time is far out of reach.

As happened the previous year, 2014 too is marked, just a few days into it, by a collaborative release from the master. Joining him this time is Kelly David, a Colorado-based musician who closely followed the evolution of the Californian scene without ever managing to emerge on a par with his contemporaries. The result is The Long Night, a grandiloquent hymn to the night, explored in all its facets and from vantage points set in different places and settings. A work that seeks and finds points of contact with some of the most distinctive universes in Roach's sonic range, from dark-ambient to the visceral pulsations coined alongside Byron Metcalf, passing through the sinewaves and the most classic astral flows that have by now become the trademark of his blend. A dark sky devoid of any light materializes in the enveloping "Last Light", crossed by tall, thick clouds in the first half of "Calm World", which then quickly dissipate in the second half to make room for sprawling constellations. In the subterranean beats of "The Deep Hours" these seem to come alive and kick off a kind of primordial dance, before stopping abruptly to make way for the simultaneous passage of multiple comets in the closing quarter-hour of the title track. All of it proof of how the dialogic bond with the natural environment continues to be, for the Californian's music, a source of vital sap that seems further and further from running dry.

2014 is also the thirtieth anniversary year of Structures From Silence, celebrated as usual by the ever-reliable Projekt with an unmissable deluxe edition. And right in step with this important anniversary, Roach returns to retrace, from a series of perspectives, the path opened by the unforgettable first masterpiece of his career. In The Delicate Forever, one of the most colorful and summarizing albums of his career, it's the softer, more generative colors of his music that take center stage once again, with delicacy called upon to act as the sole common denominator across the five suites. The title track is a long, reiterated flow that once again converts Eno's spatialized minimalism and his "1/1" into the dynamic image of wave motion. Twenty-five intensely gripping minutes of the most organic and quiet Roach since Afterlight, whose darkness turns in "Perfect Sky" into the most classic, picturesque cosmic unease. Standing in total contrast to these settings is the equally splendid music-box quality of "The Well Spring", whose dance of arpeggiators even reaches back to recover those very first experiences of Berlin-school memory already dusted off on the gem Sigh Of Ages. Equally well-realized, though decidedly less evocative, are the exploration of the inhospitable cave on "Where The Mysteries Sleep" and the hushed closer entrusted to "HearAfter", a drone carpet bathed in clear droplets. Worth reserving quickly and not letting slip away, however, is the splendid stretched-out version of the title track, extended to seventy-three minutes and offered in five hundred CD-only copies under the name The Delicate Beyond, a hypothetical alternative fate for a record that is once again masterful.

Closing out the year, after the first volume of the unmissable classics collection Desert Collection, comes the posthumous comeback alongside Jorge Reyes, who sadly passed away in 2009. The Ancestor Circle gathers tracks dating back to the preparation of the performance also released posthumously on Live In Tucson 2000: a good fourteen years ago now, roughly the same period in which the two were working on the disappointing and lifeless Vine~Bark & Spore, where ambient-trance impulses already played a fundamental role. The soundscapes once painted through percussion are here entrusted to hypnotic arpeggiators, called upon to set the rhythmic tone for the alternating/merging of the Californian's typical sinewave flows and the Gregorian-style voice of his Mexican companion. The monolithic "Memories Unsuspended" aims without hesitation for masterpiece status, perfectly balanced between trance-delic groove and the earthly melancholy to be attributed to Reyes's Amazonian whispers. The rest of the work, however, settles into a far more ordinary (if equally valid) revision of the classic canons. The ritualistic ones resurface shrouded in mist in the opening of "The Circle Opens", steeped in trance in the arcane "Espacio Escultorico" and adorned with field recordings unusually taking center stage in "Spirit, Stone And Bone". The more epic ones explode in the nostalgic close of "Temple Of Dust" and in the dark, oppressive march of "Procession Of Ancestors". The dedication to life (lost by Reyes) in the title takes on its true meaning once the listen is over: the two musicians' enchantments remain highly effective to this day.

Roach's "first" release of 2015 arrives in the company of his faithful Byron Metcalf and the Australian Rob Thomas, who had already joined the former on the excellent "Medicine Work" two years earlier. Monuments Of Ecstasy once again treads the theme of the desert and continues the Californian's "historic" research into Aboriginal rhythmic tradition, here pushed to its most extreme consequences. The long percussive odyssey of "Monuments Of Trance" is the beating heart of the progression, guiding listeners toward a state of deep, irreversible hypnosis. Counterpointing it are the long (and equally austere) introductory immersion of "Archaic Layers" and the barrage of "Molecules Of Momentum", which really does feel like a return to the days of "Origins". Amid these long red sandstorms, the arpeggiator-driven refuge of "Primal Analog" is an exception that nonetheless manages to maintain the trance state, lost only in the trail of light of the closing "This Place On Earth". The title track, meanwhile, is a genuine surprise, a midnight-blue ride born within trans-human noises and disturbances before being slowly overtaken, first by a harmonic trail and then by a melodic line (!), both entrusted to Roach. A kind of song from the deepest heart of the desert, an impressionist-key transposition of an environmental tribalism that until today (and, across the rest of the record, even now) has been immersive by its very definition. A piece that was missing from Roach's career, enriching the already high overall value of a masterful record. As ever, more so than ever.

Then comes Invisible, given away for free in digital form at the end of 2014 to the most devoted visitors of his online shop and reissued on CD by popular demand at the start of this year, in an edition of just 300 copies. Across the seventy minutes of this long immersion, Roach stages the most unsettled soundscape of the last ten years of his career: not even Possible Planet and Dynamic Stillness had gone so deep in evoking instability, in probing the dark side of the Californian master's visions. Here he even comes close to brushing against certain post-industrial deviations, in a contemplation that lingers on the most sinister, anguished details of darkness: those, precisely, tied to the loss of sight. Thus the usual immersive nebulae, capable of guiding us into the most remote corners of the imagination and evoking the most varied and distant scenarios, here transform into tools suited to new sensations: fear and unease. Silence reclaims a dominant role, and the usual continuity of the flow also decays, here broken by concrete wails, distant and unrecognizable noises. Almost as if it were the preferred, unconscious home for all those impurities usually filtered out to favor the evolution of purity.

Crafted in the final days of a dark, rainy year, simply by observing the contrasts of light and the substantial emotional parity between day and night, Invisible is an escape, a flight from the magnificent evocations of his music towards a place where the eye abdicates.

A few months later comes the return to his very first "Berlin" origins with Skeleton Keys, a record made exclusively with a setup of modular analog synths and a genuine comeback to the days of Now (also remastered on vinyl around this same period) and Traveler, before the turn taken with Structures From Silence. The opening of "The Only Way In" immediately comes across as a transfiguration into pulse of Michael Amerlan's rides, entrusted to the evolutions of a sequencer that accumulates and discards sonic elements with every pass. It's only a first approach to the material, ready to be reworked into a variety of forms starting right from the sustained march of "The Function Inside The Form". On "It's All Connected", slowed-down trancedelia comes back into play, while "Outer Weave" gets hands-on with the convulsive, hypno-tech territories of his work with Vir Unis. The return to analog purity is entrusted to the second half of the record: if "Escher's Dream Is Dreaming" and "A Subtle Twist Of Fate" simulate fascinating features respectively with Klaus Schulze and the Tangerine Dream of "Rubycon", the delicate hymn of "Saturday Somewhere" and the bow to synth-pop of "Symmetry And Balance" offer perhaps the most original takes, hardest to link to the Californian's historical past. Two cherries on top of a delicious cake, of the kind whose flavor and recipe are about as "classic" as it gets, yet always a pleasure precisely for that reason. The record is followed by a compilation, titled The Skeleton Collection 2005-2015, which retraces the entire genesis of the analog aesthetic of the "mother record" as it carried over through the decade in question, and which adds little to its poetics — as nostalgic as it is strongly current.

With his sixth credit stamped on the year 2015 between collaborations and solo albums, Steve Roach creates what is, in some respects, probably the most atypical work of the recent years of his career. Etheric Imprints marks, without any hesitation, a turn towards an isolationism with almost existential undertones, one that had already silently crept into the Californian master's fabric among the specters of Invisible. Never had a Steve Roach record felt so rarefied. No more immersions into some other environment that the music was called upon to evoke, represent and constitute at once. No more sinewaves and flows in dialogue: the overture of the title track, destined to become one of the emblematic pieces of Roach's present, surrenders itself to the subdued, resigned languor of synthetic piano notes, brushing closely against the dark contemplations of colleague Harold Budd. All around, an uneasy silence, which in the catharsis of "Indigo Shift" is enveloped by the return of deformed vocal specters, the outlines of a dark ritual at whose center sits a detonated analog arpeggiator. You have to wait for "Holding Light" to find any trace of Roach's more classic sound (and atmospheres): among flows, harmonics, comets and asteroids, a more familiar language returns. Seventeen minutes that act as a sonic exception, even as they celebrate the coming of light, which in "The Way Forward" takes on more concrete, empirical traits, amid amalgams of loops and a final melody à la Michael Danna, entrusted to the solitary voice of a keyboard. A closing that perfectly crowns a path of self-analysis that this time sets aside any meditative character, preferring instead a form of emotional realism.

In 2016 the return with Spiral Revelation, once again at the court of mr. Rosenthal, is a challenge carried out by exploring a niche running against the grain, in decline yet still full of potential: Intelligent Dance Music, IDM, as if the Arizona master were setting himself the cause/effect task of relaunching a challenge born years earlier and grown within prized niches like Timpanik.

Cycles and loops, glitches and vorticist spirals of sound are all the certainties Roach pours into the six tracks of the new full-length, with ardor, lending cellular, molecular life to a sound that would otherwise tend toward the cold and artificial: the artist's touch, the fine brushstroke of an expressionist painter of sound.

In every track reigns a contemplative harmony, small ecstasies typical of Roach; already with "We Continue", the album opener, nothing is corrupted, nothing can corrupt a crystalline sound, progressive across the countless evolutions of the relationship between synth and conceptual elaboration. Every sound is a movement, the fraction redistributed across the whole of a contemporary suite, closely refined with the conceptual approach of Philip Glass. An evolved work, in which to rediscover new inspirations with every listen, with passive ecstasy.

There are plenty of nods to electronic kraut, the fruit of long experience too, a lifetime spent behind analogue and digital machines: "Primary Phase" carries echoes of the "oxygenated" paths of Jean-Michel Jarre, while in the finale the title track delivers almost twenty minutes of pure beauty: the rush, the flow of electrons, of white and red blood cells, the migratory flight of geese scattered beyond the clouds, shoals of fish immersed in the absolute blue of sound, of life.

Having reached almost 40 years of activity, Steve Roach's journey shows no sign of stopping. Relentlessly forging ahead with ever-different dishes, continuous and at times imperceptible variations on his formula, the master of modern ambient has proven time and again to be a perfectionist and a tireless researcher, capable of dwelling on every single detail of his music, which in turn has almost always managed to move, win over and captivate listeners. In recent times, far too many critics and commentators have put forward and championed the theory that "classic" ambient music, in its pure and uncontaminated form, is undergoing an irreversible crisis. Many have traced this back to a supposed downward arc affecting the genre's standard-bearers, including the Californian himself, whose creative outpouring has offered an all-too-convenient excuse to dismiss his work, in total disregard of the constant progress and the thousand facets his music has taken on from album to album. Much to the detractors' dismay, Roach is still with us, and so is ambient music as a whole. Or perhaps the truth is that neither of them ever really left: between one supposed crisis and the next, there's always been plenty on the stove, and it promises to stay that way.

Contributions by Michele Chiusi, Nicola Tenani

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