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Tag Archives: Steve Roach
Kamelmauz: Limber I Monos Om (mini ep)
This new set follows from the surging iPhone band-in-a-hand moment. It refers to a truly odd collaboration made possible by the strange new world of the iPhone, its so-called apps, and the kinds of sonic exploring the technology makes possible. Originally I was just biding my time, waiting for the iPad, and knowing eventually be plugging it into the studio machinery.
But the iPhone came along and with it–soon enough–came a slew of app-driven opportunities, including the most prime ones of all, courtesy of ambient giants Brian Eno and Steve Roach. I have collaborated with each, and with their colleagues, in these two slow, ambient pieces. Almost anybody who has an iPhone knows what I’m speaking of–Bloom, Trope, Air–in the latter case, and, may well also know of the fine Immersion Station app of Steve Roach and Eric Freeman. (Visual mixing is very cool!)
The odd point is that none of my collaborators know they have served as my collaborators! Yet, it was inevitable I was headed toward plugging iPhone/iPad into my digital rig and into Logic and force such collaborations to bear sonic fruit. Several other apps were used; I didn’t keep notes for the ninety minute exercise cum experiment. And, at the end, I did process the tracks in the convolution reverb studio and did a down-and-dirty (what I term,) mixmaster.
The overarching formula for each piece is: Intro (Eno) / Outro (Eno+Roach.)
As always, full digital, free download are available at Kamelmauz-Soundz Bandcamp for the savvy and well-equipped soundnaut.
Intro i
Posted in inspiration, IPad/iOS audio, original music
Tagged Brian Eno, IOS5 audio, Kamelmauz, Steve Roach
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Prolific Glorious Slow Sounds
Synthesist, composer, and ambient maestro Steve Roach, in my world, is an iconic music maker. I have this week collected his autograph for the third time on a new release, provided directly via the artist’s web store. He also serves as a paragon of skipping the middle dudes and providing one’s artistry directly to the consumer, and doing so with the human touch. In fact, he’s been doing so for about a decade.
The beautifully packaged box pairs The Desert Inbetween and Immersion Five: Circadian Rhythms (two discs.) The former record, made with Brian Parnham, mines Roach’s tribal sonics with the help of multi-instrumentalist Parnham, especially his didgeridoo. Immersion Five is indeed the fifth release in Roach’s series of minimalist and meditative ambient explorations.
Steve released five recordings last year. Too much? No. I’m an advocate on behalf of artistry of the profound type, unleashing as much as is necessary. Sign of Ages was my favorite of a glorious outpouring. Here we are in the first month of 2011, and I’d describe the three discs of Roach’s new set to be necessary chapters.
Here’s a year-old taste of the Steve Roach sound, produced by Andres CV; on Vimeo.
Steve Roach music New age from andres cv on Vimeo.
Posted in masters, soundscapers, visionaries
Tagged ambient, Brian Parnham, Steve Roach
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Vibrations Slowing But Not Resting
Robert Rich, serious auralnaut
Part IV. Initially I acquainted myself with the artistry of Robert Rich via his collaborating with Steve Roach on the superb Strata from 1991; but, probably I got to hear it sometime in 1993. By 1993 Rich had released ten records. Yet, at the time, I didn’t seek to unravel the Rich strand in Strata, and so he wasn’t on my radar screen. This all changed the first year working back in a record store. It was 1995 and my very hip assistant manager Chris (aka DJ Weirton,) hipped me to illbient and other urban electronic music. To make a short story shorter, both of us were all over certain labels, so when Asphodel dropped the two sets, A Swarm of Drones, and A Storm of Drones, that year, each slid into the CD player in the store pronto.
The compilations spread a massive exhalation of drones over seven sides. There, amongst tracks by Steve Roach, Ellen Fullman, Stuart Dempster, DJ Spooky, Robert Fripp and Robert Rich–those being the the only participants I was familiar with–were a host of new lights about to shine in my deep space cosmos.
Yet it was Rich and his tracks Bouyant On a Motionless Deluge, and and an excerpt from The Smorgh Sleeps On Velvet Tongues, that leaped out. I jumped on two records released the previous year, Propagation and Rainforest. Wow. Robert Rich’s ambient vision was, at that time, a bit more advanced than that of Steve Roach. His music was more diverse and the tribal elements more organic. I wouldn’t make this distinction about their relative standing today; after all, to me Roach and Rich are the equivalent of Miles Davis and John Coltrane in ambient music. But, back then, Rich’s mellow, exotic, shapely and spacy music drew me to it with an even greater siren song.
Alas, his older records were hard to get. A compilation drawn from those older records, A Troubled Resting Place, helped my investigation. I was restless, and, then excited to learn Rich had a new record finished, a collaboration, with one B. Lustmord.
Stalker. I will say this: it’s the ambient music that had the most far-reaching impact on me. It is in the same esteemed place with respect to my appreciation of ambient artistry as Mingus’s The Black Saint & the Sinner Lady is in with respect to my appreciation of jazz artistry. This is to suggest that it was through dealing with Stalker, that I began to intuit how deep was the craft and technique involved in etching sound worlds where events could be said to happen slowly.
Not as prolific as his peer Steve Roach, Rich continues to present a masterpiece every so often. Although Rich’s tribal ambient style is sustained these days in various collaborations, when left to only his own devices he seems to be recently zeroing in on a simmering, very slow, mellow dark ambient sonic vision. He’s got no competition as a drone-maker.
