Search - Steve Roach :: Light Fantastic

The high priest and wizard king of the ostensibly New Age corner of the ambient movement, Steve Roach is an American Brian Eno, except where Eno's ambient classics track a very British interior terrain, Roach musically maps the mysteries of the American Southwest. But like Eno, he's always been as much about rhythm and percussion as space and texture, and as much a music futurist as a sound designer. Like this year's Body Electric, Light Fantastic couples techno-inspired, tribalesque breakbeats and jungle grooves with thick washes of "Roach-tone"--a glistening, rapturous synthesizer sound that is to electronic-hero Roach what "woman-tone" is to guitar-hero Eric Clapton. Peppered with tribal percussion, the drum & bass kickoff "Trip the Light" suggests a panethnic Photek, while the haunting "Breathing the Pulse" evokes Roach's eerie Magnificent Void, albeit undercut with a thickly layered, gurgling rhythm--what programmer Vir Unis calls a "fractal groove." Touches of tamboura, filter sweeps, and searing glasslike washes deliver on Roach's desire to "create sounds that gave off a laserlike illumination." Enlightening. --James Rotondi