home > browse > cd-feature > view article

CD Feature/ Steve Roach: "Storm Surge"

  Tobias

While some artists try reinventing themselves with each and every record (or with every new trend), Steve Roach keeps coming back to the same places. Interestingly enough, this has made his work everything but predictable. Rather than toying with technology for its own sake, he has used a set of re-occuring terms, themes and thoughts as markers to his musical excursions. Three of them are again present on “Storm Surge”, which captures his performance at the Nearfest 2005: Meditation, Passage/Portal and the void.

Indeed, it appears to be the latter where some of these tracks are born from, developing from a point of chaos (the space of all possibilities) to structure, texture and form. Contrary to what the record company had to say, this is in fact not an “uninterrupted” 45 minutes, but rather two mutually linked and interwoven pieces separated into several parts. In the first half, Roach moulds the rawness of “This Planet” into the mysteriously shimmering harmonies of “Wings of Icarus”, before diving into the aptly titled “Core Meditation”, an almost ten minute long vortex of apocalyptic sounds and a hypnotic tunnel of pulsating hihat figures. In the second round, the music follows a similar path, but remains more intimate and withdrawn, to the point of being romantic. The only excemption is the breathtaking Berlin School of Electronics-ride “NEARstorm”, a darkly floating sea of sequencer motives, chains of twinkling chimes and drawn-out choral sighs, which glides on a magic carpet of airy melodic clouds. Gently circling round its own axis, the album goes deeper and deeper into the unknown, opening up the passage it promised at the beginning. Still, wile being a “representative” Steve Roach release in many respects, this is anything but a regular live album. For one, few artists nowadays have the courage of presenting a concert without the use of some seemingly obligatory overdubs and post production. It is therefore a nice surprise that “Storm Surge” comes as a fine a balance between the “environmental” recordings in the hall and the line-out of the mixing console, managing to sound both clear and richly detailed, while truly conveying a sense of urgency, adrenalin and that undefinable “live feeling”. And while most artists use the stage to drastically extend their pieces, this is in fact a very focussed set, with most tracks settling around the four minute mark. Change and continuation, therefore, are interconnected at every moment.

It is somehow fitting that all of this took place at a festival, for which Roger Dean designed the logo, an artist who firmly believes that we can experience apirituality through the material word – a philosophy (we suppose) Steve Roach can sympathize with. And just as with Dean, it is not the constant flux of different approaches, which makes us realize the “new” in his music, bur rather the way in which he manages to show us the same from various perspectives. And it is always good to return to these places.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Steve Roach
Homepage: Nearfest Records