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Steve Roach
And luckily for the listener, Steve caught each moment of this sound oddessey in a visionary recording, creating a musical journey that's as mystical and subtle as its title, where Roach stirs the primitive spirit with its improvisational grace. The instrumentation consists of two electric guitars, (Stratocaster and
Baritone Guitar), Ebow, extensive live looping and sound processing gear
along with 'mantra beat', a percussion loop, on one piece. According to
Steve, its about focusing on minimal-essential technology to bring out
the maximum opportunity for subdued emotive expression. Roach is not a
man to employ a lot of notes, and he is extremely adept at finding the
space between the notes and using this silence to best effect. Caught
"on the fly", each piece on the disc fits together like a completed
puzzle of interlocking parts, seamlessly viewed as a canvas of creativity;
magical, deep and inspired.
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Steve
Roach creates an insidous organic sonic plasma that doesn't so much instill
meditative states as absorb you into them in the six compositions that
comprise Streams and Currents. Continuing in the direction begun
on his best-selling disc, Midnight Moon (Projekt 2000), Steve uses
treated guitars and looping devices to create sonic bits of flotsam, sending
them out into space and then reintegrating them into an electrifying bold
new entity. For those accustomed to Roach's glaciated formations and the
continued evolution of ambient music, and his ingenious looping and effects
processing, the album becomes required listening on the learning curve.
As its title would suggest, Streams and Currents is a recording
of transcendent beauty. It grew out of deeply inspired late night sessions
between late August and Mid-September 2001. In his own words, Steve has
these words to describe his new album, "Of my pieces, I feel these
are perhaps the most intimate and directly expressive of 'being
in the present moment.' As the CD evolves, a sense of quiet seems to engulf
the tracks progressively; it is something I have never quite captured
before in this way."