Steve Roach – Structures From Silence

Considered by many to be one of the crowning achievements in the ambient genre, Structures From Silence was a dramatic departure from Roach’s previous heavily sequenced Berlin-school favored albums, and was largely inspired by the elliptical slow-moving works of SoCal’s Harold Budd and Brian Eno’s Ambient series. Roach stated his approach to “Structures” was to be fully engaged with his synthesizer and aware of his emotional state, understanding the instrument’s inherent artificial quality and the fact that the performer doesn’t really need to be fully present to create electronically composed music. The resulting album may be slow-moving, but it’s pulsing with life and human complexity. Pure and ethereal atmospheric tones drift, percolate, and swell, powerfully resonating an entire spectrum of deep emotion. Its contemplative healing quality is the most persistent but melancholy, hope, grief, quite literally anything could be transpired from this evocative and mirror-like music.

-DM

Recommended – Full Listen