Steve Roach is one of the people who could run for the title of greatest new-age musician. Structures From Silence, Dreamtime Return and World's Edge, not to mention the records made in collaboration with Robert Rich, plus those recorded as part of Suspended Memories, are masterpieces leagues above the rest of what's out there (rock, jazz or whatever it may be).
Roach's work, as it progressively freed itself from the stereotypes of "space music" and instead approximated world-music, presented itself increasingly as a fundamental experience of our time. Along with Jon Hassell and a handful of others, Roach understood how to forge a new, pan-ethnic genre of "electronic chamber music" with psychoanalytical overtones, centered around the triad of "the ancient, the mystic and the subconscious", and whose language emerges from the dialectic between primitive ritualism and futuristic technology. From this genre, Roach created moments of truly high art, worthy of the greatest composers of the century. Roach is one of the greatest musicians of new-age music.
Roach then launched the Suspended Memories project, recruiting the Mexican flautist Jorge Reyes and the Spanish guitarist Suso Saiz, a sort of new age supergroup. Forgotten Gods (Hearts Of Space, 1993) is their first album.
The most suggestive element of the album lies in the juxtaposition of the two supernatural timbres of Reyes and Saiz (which always ultimately refer to some state of trance) with the timeless electronics of Roach. With Reyes' clay flute in the place of Hassell's trumpet and Saiz's guitar "ohms" in the place of electronic "drones", the trio created a new standard of authorial world-music, which is sublimated when the flutes of Reyes create a superhuman vortex in Mutual Tribes or when Saiz's guitar intones the reverbs of Night Devotion. Snake Song seems to want to add vocals to the mix, with a chant-like register that descends from the folklore of the Red Indians.
The most forgrounded element, however, is the rhythm. Progressing in his process of almost maniacal impersonation of Aboriginal civilisation, Roach arrives at an increasingly aggressive, increasingly tribal musical form, of which the feverish delirium of Different Deserts represents the manifesto.
Roach is now a master in musically and emotionally rendering all the suspense that reigns in the natural world. He does this through a conspicuous and widespread use of small chamber noises, small dissonances that follow one another discreetly, like the clicking of percussion. The score of his hallucinations thus includes the sounds of the desert which agitate the whole of Different Deserts and, at the end, ultimately take over at the end; also the sinister noises in the dark of Saguaro (which simulate coyotes, vultures, snakes and insects) and the metaphysical ones of the title track (in which the long majestic "drones" of the keyboards seem to indicate the otherworldly presence), ending in Shaman's Dream, hinted at through a riot of percussion and dissonance.
The desert is perhaps the true protagonist of this music, imbued with magical-astral atmospheres, sinister pauses, prehistoric cadences, organic harmonies, moulded by the forms of cacti and snakes.
Earth Island is made of hallucinations of the sun, through which we pass into a parallel universe of echoes and natural noises. Jon Hassell's futurist and primitivist world-music prevails in Melting World, a catalog of subconscious sounds mixed in an icy wind of electronic hiss.
The dark and torpid movements of First Man and Places Inbetween insinuate visions of other times and other places, with Roach still discovering new ways of world-music, in an increasingly ambitious attempt to coin a music of the supernatural. Every single sound in these songs has its own psychological (but perhaps also anthropological, archaeological and epistemological) role.
Source: https://www.scaruffi.com/avant/roach.html
Tracklist:
0:00 1 - Different Deserts
12:20 2 - Snake Song
19:04 3 - Night Devotion
22:55 4 - Saguaro
28:18 5 - Mutual Tribes
35:24 6 - Suspended Memories, Forgotten Gods
41:25 7 - Ritual Noise
45:13 8 - Distant Look
53:02 9 - Shaman's Dream
Label: Hearts Of Space – HS11034-2
Format: CD, Album
Country: US
Released: 1993
Genre: Electronic
Style: Tribal, Ambient
TTA/Losssless
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