Steve Roach: World's Edge

I first came across Steve Roach when joyously discovering his Structures From Silence release. I went on from there to buying Dreamtime Return and now own many Roach releases and collaborations. This is my first chance officially to review a work of his.

First off, I can quickly summarize World's Edge in saying this a wonderfully executed blending of all those things that worked so well in Structures from Silence and Dreamtime Return. Disc One incorporates a healthy dose of the Aboriginal percussives into Roach's trademark swelling drone-breathing synths. A perfect balance of tension-release, anticiptation-relaxation, and trancezone/ world-stopping is woven in a fine tapestry of ethereal soundworlds. Ten tracks ranging from 3:05 to 10:25 offer some of Roach's best works for the blank-stare, alpha-waved, drool-inducing moments. I'm there dude in the "Roach-cocoon" buried 5 miles beneath the surface of Titan, millennia after the death of the Sun. Are you with me?

Disc Two offers essentially another hour of one nonstop Roachscape, transporting you even further through massive gong calls, synthvoice wordless chants—Tibetan ruins among Cydonian foothills, crumbling on the dust storm-eroded face of Mars, now welcome your naked soul. I hear Roach's The Magnificent Void here too. This is Roach as best as I can describe for you. As I do for only a select handful of artists—I highly recommend you ambient-heads and electronic tunes-devotees make sure this is in your collection. Thanks for all the trips, Steve. Now passing the outer regions of the unknown . . .