Steve Roach

If there's one musician who can claim to have earned a lifetime monopoly on an entire genre, it's Steve Roach. It's hard indeed to find an artist or band who have tied their name so inseparably and all-encompassingly to a genre as this Californian musician has done with ambient music. Because his seminal body of work hasn't just set a new standard or brought about a single innovation - it has repeatedly reshaped the genre's contours, like puzzle pieces that can be reassembled in countless combinations. His greatest gift, though, is probably having known - and still knowing today, thirty-five years after his debut, and still averaging 2-3 albums of new material a year, the latest of which came out barely a month ago - how to conjure up an almost infinite array of shades, all interconnected, within which his progressive sonic revolutions unfold: his "thousand ways of seeing ambient" that, for at least two decades, have served as the starting point for anyone approaching atmospheric electronic music.

At the start of his journey, Roach took as his departure point the endpoints reached by the German cosmic couriers, and above all the advanced environmental and ethnic theories of Brian Eno and Jon Hassell, distilling them into an extreme synthesis and establishing a new vision of electronic music, reiterated - as already mentioned - across the most disparate variants, all nonetheless containable within a style that has become, over time, the standard par excellence, the classic form of ambient music. What also shifts with his work is the conceptual meaning of "ambient music" itself: the Eno-esque vision of sound applied to space is transported toward soundscapes devoid of any physical dimension. His music abandons the object and the earthly environment (be it the airport or the humus) to move into abstraction, toward everything that is infinite and undefined. Whether aimed at the cosmos, the void, or new and imaginary environments, the Californian's explorations always manage to transcend any limited imaginary, evoking "new", unimaginable visions, without ever veering into the artificial (a trait typical instead of his contemporary and equally seminal Robert Rich). Rich is just one of many fellow countrymen who contributed to the thoroughly Californian rewriting of the genre: other names include Michael Stearns, Kevin Braheny, Michael Amerlan, A Produce, Thom Brennan, Richard Burmer and Tim Clark, all of whom, in any case, are likewise indebted to Roach's work.

The musician's first revolution comes in 1984, when his third album, "Structures From Silence", fuses "Music For Airports" with the more fluid kosmische music of Tangerine Dream, weaving them together with an entirely new thread, and in doing so coining the first great manifesto of what would from then on be known as ambient music. But as already mentioned, the Californian's palette is made up of an almost inexhaustible variety of combinations, which would gradually lead him to introduce ever new and unprecedented languages. And so, just four years after his first great album, Roach arrives at what is, to this day, the central pillar of his body of work, his unsurpassed masterpiece. "Dreamtime Return" is a seminal record for the development of modern ambient music and an unbreakable treatise that at least three subsequent generations would follow to the letter. Roach draws inspiration from the life and spirituality of Australian Aboriginal peoples, and it's precisely this element that forms the focus of the entire work.

Split across two discs, the album brings together two of the main strands that would come to characterize his output: the ethnic-tribal side - which would later flow into his hypno-trance turn - on the first disc, and the purely ambient-cosmic side on the second. This "new ambient" is worlds away from Brian Eno's "non-musician" and "non-music": Roach stages a Copernican revolution in 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" introduces the rhythmic element right from the start, while simultaneously falling back on melodic undercurrents of extraordinary impact; meanwhile, in the quiet pulsations of "Songline" and "Atribe Meets The Dream Ghosts" lurk those same minimalist nods that had characterized the first phase of his career, reworked here, however, in the name of an ethno-ambient sound close to the contemporary work of Forrest Fang, who in turn owes a great deal to this very album.

Bold abstraction pervades the romantic string interweaving of "The Other Side", among the true masterpieces of his entire output, as well as the visionary mass of "A Circular Ceremony", before giving way to pure atmosphere in the closing triptych of "Magnificent Gallery"-"Truth In Passing" and, above all, "Australian Dawn – The Quiet Earth Cries Inside".

The second half, meanwhile, is entirely devoted to the reprise of the cosmic ambient sound that had made "Structures From Silence" great, and which — together with the strand rooted in rhythm — would become the starting point for much of Roach's later output: from the nods to the most elegant, sophisticated new age of "Through A Strong Eye", to the tribute to the best of Harold Budd in "The Ancient Day", to the closing bow to metaphysical desolation in the phenomenal "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 walked the genre's path since 1987 owes a good part of their inspiration to this album. From the Californian scene of Stearns and Brennan to recent electro-acoustic drifts, not to mention the standard-bearers of modern nostalgic ambient (Max Corbacho and Craig Padilla chief among them), there is no artist or work that doesn't carry in its DNA a molecule originating from this record. Able to reproduce, 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 micro-structuring, minimal in its overflow and rich in innovation within its simplicity.

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08/07/2013