space music sweat lodge

"My concerts are a flowing, seamless, collective dreamscape that we’re all stepping into for a couple of hours. There’s an amazing amount of subtle tweaking, and responding to the space, and I can move into the realm of shadow. They can be overwhelming, I push the sound system to the limit, then back off. It’s like [being] in a sweat lodge, building the heat up until it’s almost unbearable, then rinsing off, and doing it again"

- Steve Roach, interviewed at bandcamp.daily


Also interesting on the relationship between his music and the desert where he lives:


"The sense of time is the through-line woven into all of my work. That’s why I chose to live in a desert environment because, visually, there is a different sense of time here. Everything around me is about expansiveness, and space, and texture, and physical extremes. There is a kind of audio-sensual impact from the environment that has a big effect on me....


"It’s like the tabula rasa state. What I get constantly when I step outside is that I’m in this place where my thoughts cannot be contained. It just feels like sound. I feel sound all the time—not necessarily music, but sound forms emerging when I see certain features of the desert. They translate to sound, and it’s renewing every day. That flow, wanting to be connected to that sound current, that’s the beauty of having the space to create in on your own terms."


I'm guessing the desert state he lives in is Arizona, which is proper New Agey (Sedona with its power spots... the tinkle of wind chimes often to be heard on our SW driving vacation of some years ago)



Roach has long been on that long - ever lengthening - list of figures i need have to a proper explore with the discography



This is the album considered to be his classic




Noticed that he did an album with the same title as a late period Omni Trio  - Skeleton Keys



Odd that he's such an analog, hardware fixated guy - and never transitioned to computers, DAWs etc - if only because the music is so clean and clear and regular in its construction that it might just as well be achieved digitally 



Here's an earlier tour of mine through this zone, albeit more about the prehistory of 'space music' in the Roach sense, or perhaps it's the first half of the game, that then continues with Roach, Stearns et al. 

                                      

Ah convergence point of the Steve Roach and Robert Haigh universes - Rob gets reviewed in Audion, the magazine of space music