Steve Roach will perform an all night set on October 26th at the Lloyd Wright constructed Institute of Mentalphysics in Joshua Tree.

A bonafide living legend, the desert-based ambient pioneer Steve Roach was part of an early wave of American artists pushing the boundaries of synthesizer music. While his early works were largely inspired by Berlin-School artists like Klaus Schultze and Tangerine Dream, Roach quickly emerged with his own sound in the mid-80s with the now-seminal albums Structures from Silence and Quiet Music, which presented an entirely new type of ambient electronic music that was slow-moving, but pulsing with life and human complexity. While most other synthesizer artists at the time were creating heavily sequenced

sounds inspired by the future or the cosmos, Roach looked inward to more expanded states of consciousness where the warmth of his sustained synthesizer tones could fully inhabit and surround the listener, much like the vast and powerful desert, where Roach spent the majority of his childhood.

On Saturday, October 26th, Roach will be returning to the desert to perform a very special concert titled “All Night Ambience” at the Lloyd Wright constructed Institute of Mentalphysics in Joshua Tree. The show will be presented by Mobius Acoustics with support from Living Earth.

Tickets are available now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/steve-roach-live-in-joshua-tree-tickets-911674010507

In anticipation of the show, In Sheep’s Clothing’s Phil Cho connected with Roach over Zoom to learn more about his musical upbringing, the influence of the desert, and the stories behind some of his seminal albums.

Hey Steve! How's it going? You're currently based in Arizona now?

S: Yeah, I moved here from Los Angeles in ’91, so I’ve been here well over 30 years. I have my studios on a ridge top. Right now, I’m looking beyond the computer and I can see Mexico almost 100 miles from here. You can see the storms rolling in, and it really feeds my work and my music constantly.

You originally grew up in La Mesa, Southern California. What was it like growing up there?

La Mesa is in San Diego county about 15 miles inland. It was kind of the ultimate petri dish for a young guy to grow up in Southern California. I was born in 1955, so I was there through the whole pinnacle of the ’60s and ’70s, and then I left to go to LA in the ’80s. It’s kind of the perfect world to grow up in terms of weather and options of things to do at all times. The music scene was fairly conservative, so you had to kind of dig your own tunnels into wherever you find the magic music that you wanted to hear. That started with me working at an import record store. That was really cool. I was cracking open boxes of all the classic early electronic stuff coming in, i.e. Klaus Schulze, Steve Hillage, Tangerine Dream, CAN, and, of course, Eno. That was the conduit to everything that would unfold for me. But the desert itself was the biggest inspiration from the earliest days. I spent a lot of time out in the Anza-Borrego desert, which is a fantastic area out there. That was huge influence on me before I thought about even doing music.

“The desert itself was the biggest inspiration from the earliest days. I spent a lot of time out in the Anza-Borrego desert… That was huge influence on me before I thought about even doing music.”

One of your earliest music projects was with a group called Mobius (not to be confused with the German electronic music pioneer). Can you tell us more about those early years?

When I moved to LA, I was connecting with people through this electronic music magazine called Synapse, which, at the time, was the very first electronic music magazine that interviewed all the emerging electronic groups from Europe, England, and also the more academic scene that was happening in the States. Cal Arts and Mills College were really big melting pots for electronic music in the West Coast. So I met up with these guys (Mobius), who were a few years older than me. They were already in the deep end of that kind of world. They went to Cal Arts and were studying with Morton Subotnik and Harold Budd. So they kinda took me under their wing. They saw how crazy I was to do electronic music. I moved to LA in the early ’80s. At that point, there was a scene that was building, but it was still underground, so to speak.

Mobius was formed by Bryce Robbley and Doug Lynner. They had a band before that called Limb, which was live electronic music, but Mobius had more of a Kraftwerk, Devo, early electronic and new wave influences. We became the first band ever to play an electronic show at Troubadour. So we were doing that sort of thing, but it wasn’t the music I really wanted to be doing. It was a great way to get your feet wet and do shows. Then I quickly started doing solo live electronic shows with my Arp 2600, Micro Moog, sequencer, string synth, and echoes. I started to build the vision that I had at the very beginning to create the kind of music that I’m creating and doing now.

It seems like a lot of the early synth music during that period was aesthetically more cosmic, futuristic, or sci-fi while it seemed like your approach was more grounded to the earth.

The organic quality of my music had a lot to do with growing up in the desert in a world where you weren’t surrounded and influenced by manmade things, buildings, streets, the kind of structure that imposes upon your consciousness. Being an only child, I was really fortunate that my parents loved to go camping and out to the mountains. That was pretty much a constant activity. I was fine being an only child. I could entertain myself a lot of ways out there. Being in that space was so powerful in those formative years of how you are in the world and what’s important to you. You don’t even know it’s important to you yet, but something feels really profound, deep, and connected. I can say those words now as an adult. It was just the perfect kind of environment to grow up in.

I had a sort of natural attraction towards a space that was beyond the ordinary states of consciousness or reality. Even though I didn’t know what it was, I would always feel kind of expanded, or you might say high, but more like out of my body, more free, and not concerned with dramas with other kids and stuff like that. Through the process of being in that environment for a lot of years, I think it really set me up to find an art form that would let me start to create and nurture those kind of spaces. I was craving to be in an everyday environment. So the music kind of grew out of my desire to create these zones, these spaces, and these expanded states that I wasn’t finding anywhere. I should say, I was finding them in some of the music coming from Europe especially, but there was something calling me to get my hands on the instruments and work in that medium. I was painting and doing a little bit of art sculpting and that sort of thing, but it was nothing near the visceral quality of being completely immersed in sound and music.

Your first solo album, Traveler, was still influenced by kosmische and Berlin-school music. How did you develop your own sound out of those early influences?

At the very beginning, I was inspired by Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schultze, the German school, and all of that. That’s what I was learning by listening, and then creating and in that form. With sequencers, especially, you can get into that space really quickly. It was a great way to also just learn about the rudiments of music, because I’m self taught and never really fit into an academic world. I tried to take an electronic music course very early on, and I don’t even think I made it through the class. In there, it was going to be like five years before I even get my hands on a synth. So one day I figured out that I had to get the equipment and just immerse myself in it. I came from a working class family and we really didn’t have that kind of money, so I got a 25% interest loan and bought the ARP 2600 and Moog. I had a day job in a factory and just started learning this stuff at night. It just clicked really naturally to me. The tools felt intuitive, and I felt like I already knew how to create with these tools.

So you move through that period where you create, draw lines around things that you’re inspired by, and then you start to move away from that. I got my hands on the Oberheim, a polyphonic synth. That was my first real synthesizer where you could create and play with eight voices. You could play chords and program beautiful, incredible sounds. To me, it was like getting a cello of electronic music. It just had this really emotional, warm, beautiful quality to it. I was always drawn towards harmonic masses of sound. I would hear it in pieces of music where I just wanted to isolate and hear that sound with all the other traditional stuff removed from it.

The Oberheim was what led me to Structures from Silence. Finally having my hands on this beautiful sounding instrument, I could carve it up and create just the sound that I was feeling internally. I started moving into that quality that you hear on the album, which is this diaphanous relationship with the sound, meaning that I’m breathing with that instrument. That was an epiphany I had right when getting into early synthesis, that you could just fall asleep on it. In those early years, I was meditating and bringing that element of breath awareness to it. You could play a drone album, and that might be cool, and I love drone music, but in terms of bringing in a human element, it’s about breath and the space between the breath.

This all seemed to stem from a lifelong desire to have the sound wrap around me. The breathing, along with the warmth of that instrument, was a very natural, intuitive way to approach that idea and created what you hear on Structures. The time it takes to hear Structures is really the time it took to create it; it was created in that 130-minute span. I recorded it live into a digital sequencer that could then hit long phrases on the Oberheim. I could hit stop/loop/play and then it would play for two or three weeks, two months, or whatever outwards. I could just live in it. I’d come home after work, it would be playing, I would go in and interact with it. Eventually, I took the instrument into a studio and then, still with the original impulse that created it, shaped it into the record. I wanted to record it at 30 ips, and the best sound quality we could onto tape with a high quality Lexicon reverb. That’s pretty much the genesis of that piece. It was a very intuitive, natural connection to tone, and to silence and to breathe.

Your next releases, a series titled Quiet Music, continue to build on the ideas from Structures of Silence. This idea of "silence" is aligned, but somewhat different from Brian Eno’s definition of ambient music. Can you share your intention behind Quiet Music?

Quiet Music was a natural outgrowth from Structures. Those three albums came out as a set, a 360-minute piece. One of them, Quiet Music 1, was commissioned by this man who wanted to create an album of healing music for people that were in the state of getting ready to pass through to the other side. There’s absolutely zero tension in all of that music, it’s especially gentle and nurturing. That whole period was a very obvious turn away from sequencers and the European school. I was really finding my voice away from that. I still love that music and I would return to that later on, but when all of that started to emerge it just really had to come out. There was no choice in it at that point.

If you think back to that time, there wasn’t really a lot you could compare it to. There was certainly a “new age” kind of music that was happening, but I wasn’t really connected to that scene or community of people. I wasn’t really a loner, but I was alone a lot, and I lived in LA. I had a small group of friends, and eventually that would expand with concerts starting to take off, but there was really this kind of deep satisfaction of being along, working, and developing through my own natural process. There was a very conscious decision to move away from the European sound.

Quiet Music also incorporated field recordings of natural sounds alongside synthesizers and organic instruments like flute. Can you talk about how those elements came to be a part of your music?

In the beginning, it was really another level of adding this kind of tincture, like a homeopathic dosage of something that’s going to immediately change the sense of space and location, but do so in a way that’s not going to compete or interfere with the music, but actually enhance the intention of the music in a way that was gentle and artful. It was a compositional decision to have something that would immediately change your sense of location and space, and put you into a place where your heart rate’s slowing down. So again, there was an intentional healing aspect of that. Eventually, field recording was used so much that it would become a cliche in early new age music with the babbling brook and all that kind of stuff.

Going back to your previous question about Brian Eno, I’d heard his music, but I can’t say it was really an influence. The work he did with Harold Budd, I really love, but I didn’t feel a big shift when I heard Eno’s music because I was already thinking or feeling in that dimension after hearing Klaus Schulze’s music and some of the deeper, penetrating forms of electronic music. Eno’s music was certainly affirming in that it wasn’t marked out by boundaries of time. That was a really big point for me for so much of the early music. I really didn’t want that sense of a beginning and an end.

You mentioned earlier that you had a group of friends in Los Angeles. Was there a sort of community of explorers you were connected to? What was the discourse in the synth community like during that time?

There was Michael Stearns, who released that Planetary Unfolding album. I lived in Culver City, right off of Venice Boulevard, and he lived on the other side of Venice Boulevard, right by the Hare Krishna temple. We were really close to each other and we became friends. I would do some mixing and pre-mastering with him in his studio, and we became friends for many years. There was also Robert Rich, who was from the Bay Area, and then Kevin Braheny, who worked for Serge synthesizers at the time. There was a core group of us, and it seemed like we all fit the same profile of guys that would hole up in our rooms with our gear.

We would do our music, and then we would sometimes come together and compare notes or just share the music with each other. I wouldn’t say there was a great deal of influence between us, but I would say there was support and friendship. We all kind of had this vision of where we were going, and it was somewhat in the same direction. Eventually I met up with some visual arts people so I’d bring some of that into the concerts. It was a vibrant community of artists, and I considered myself an artist in sound, so that fit into the whole thing. With the LA lifestyle, it’s a whole explosion of energy going on at all times so it was an incredibly exciting time. Being close to Venice Beach and that whole scene was just an endless source of places to get inspired. I did a great number of concerts all over LA during that time.

I was just about to ask, what were some of those memorable shows during that time? Any interesting or unexpected locations?

There was a club in Venice Beach called the Come Back Inn, which had an outdoor patio, and we did some really fascinating concerts there. Would would also get shoehorned into traditional rock clubs in the off-hours. It was kind of like an experiment. I remember playing at clubs in Pasadena and all over the Valley. Probably some of the best shows that happened in LA were at Pomona College.

Chuck, who owns Rhino Records in Claremont, is a deep friend since day one. My first cassette, Now, went to his store when it first released. Chuck promoted two concerts at Pomona College that were amazing, with 5,600 people in the student center. At that time in the mid ’80s, hardly anybody was performing live with a big Arp 2600 with three sequencers, string ensemble, and Emu sampler. That’s where Kevin Braheny and I recorded the other side that you hear on Dreamtime Return. Then two big shows went down at Saddleback College. Those shows in the college environment were just really exciting. People had never heard this music live before. I would play for an hour, take a break because I had to retune everything, and then play the second half. Those old synthesizers would be falling out of tune during the concert. There were also just endless smaller gigs at shops on Melrose Boulevard. I mean, I would just play anywhere, in the weirdest situations. I’d play at house parties. I was just going through the whole process of sharing this feeling that I have out there. It’s pretty surreal when I think back on it, the places that I ended up playing.

You mentioned playing during the off-hours of a club. That seems really interesting to me. How does that work in a club setting? What hours would that be?

It would be later in the night. The show would end at eleven and I’d set up and play for an hour and a half. There was one theater on La Cienaga that had music, but they also had like a stage theater, so it was a multifunctional place. The guy who ran it really fell in love with the music. He said, “Why don’t you just do a weekly series here like every Friday night for two months? That sort of thing was cool. You were right off Sunset Boulevard, and you’re just putting the word out. They called it Midnight Music. It was billed as electronic music. Of course, ambient music wasn’t a way of describing it then. I would set up my whole rig and be like, “Well, there’s three people here. Now there’s six people. Okay, it’s time to play now. We’re all here.” But you know, I knew that I just had to do it. You just keep doing what you love to do, and then hopefully it builds, you know? Even now when I go out and play, I’m still like, “Well, I hope there’s some people here.” I don’t take anything for granted in this world.

I wanted to mention your album The Leaving Time with percussion virtuoso Michael Shrieve. He was a longtime collaborator of yours. That album also features David Torn on guitar and Jonas Hellborg on bass. This is quite different from your Quiet Music and almost seemed like a band project, in a way?

So I grew up listening to Santana albums, Abraxas Pool, Woodstock and all that stuff. I had heard Michael’s playing with Klaus Schulze. I never thought in a million years I would be in the same room with Michael, let alone working on an album with him. We ended up on the same label, Fortuna Records, and then we got introduced through Ethan Edgecomb. He had just released an album that he created with Klaus Schulze. We ended up talking on the phone. I mean, this is a legendary musician, but he was so warm and gracious, and all that sort of melted away. He was coming down to LA. So we met up and just hit it off instantly, and started creating like the next day. We thought, “Well, let’s try some stuff out here.” That’s the best way to have a conversation.

That’s the core of how that album was created. In the midst of going out to dinner and hearing all these great stories, we would work out of my studio in Venice. It started with a few days, and then it extended out. Part of the idea of The Leaving Time was that the studio sessions just kept extending. “Are you going to leave?” “I’m not leaving.” But then The Leaving Time also has a double meaning, because over dinner I talked about this burning feeling to leave San Diego, leaving all that behind. The tendrils of your past life and leaving all that behind. The metaphor became something more. Also, we were all leaving to go to different places. I was getting ready to go to Australia and Michael was living in New York at that time.

So he and I created the base foundation of those tracks over a few days. When I came back from Australia, the second week Michael was in LA, he knew Jonas Hellborg was coming to LA to play with John McLaughlin. Somehow he got ahold of Jonas and said, “Hey, we’re working on this album. Can you play on two tracks?” Jonas said, “Well, pick me up at the airport, I’ll come in, do the tracks, and then take me to the Hollywood Bowl to finish the concert with John.” So we pick him up at LAX and go to Venice. He laid the bass tracks down within an hour, and then we dropped him off at his hotel by the Hollywood Bowl. That was the last I ever saw of him.

David Torn came into the loop because we both loved his music. Michael met up with him in New York, because at that time, he lived in Woodstock, New York. At that point, we had received a record deal to finish the album for RCA Records. We already had these beautiful foundation tracks that you hear with Jonas on them. So then we flew to Millbrook, upstate New York, to this fantastic studio, not far from where Torn was living. David came in for about four days and we just had a field day in there. It started out really beautiful weather and by the time we left, it snowed. All of that was just wild. Then Michael laid down acoustic drums in a really big space to get that big John Bonham sound that you hear on “Edgerunner.”

It was an incredible learning experience and to be with one of the legends in the world of rock music. We just became friends, regardless of the span of age or where I came from, and all of that sort of thing. He was tapping into my intensity with all that I was doing. It was a perfect fit. Eventually, we finished the album and mixed it at Pat Gleeson’s studio in San Francisco. It was a kind of strange group that formed from all these different points in time, and it all fit together, and it all gelled, and then that was it. It was released on Novus Records, which was a subsidiary of BMG and primarily a jazz label. It became this sort of lost album because it had all the ingredients of a big album, but they were just bewildered. They didn’t know where it fit in anywhere. It’s really an amalgamation of a lot of different popular styles and emerging styles of music. It was a favorite for a lot of people out there when it came out, but the promotion department was just kind of bewildered. They wanted to promote it, and they wanted to do what they do, but, at that time, the categories where you would try to pipe music out to was really more conservative. So if you had something that existed between the cracks, that’s kind of where it would end up staying.

Your next album, Dreamtime Return, continued some of the more rhythmic ideas explored with Michael Shrieve on Leaving Time. Can you talk about the inspirations behind the rhythms in your music?

After the Empetus album, I was starting to move towards the desert solitaire. I was bringing more of the desert expansiveness and the slower kind of loping grooves, as if you’re moving across the desert on some kind of creature. The rhythmic element grew out of its own kind of world in that I was moving towards these longer atmospheric spaces. This was occurring before I met up with Michael. In order to tell the stories that I was wanting to tell, I wanted to start putting movement to feel like you’re moving across or moving towards within these atmospheres and textural zones.

Then the Oberheim drum machine came into the picture, and I was able to start programming beats that grew out of what I was hearing in my imagination on this horizon line of texture and sound. I wanted to move into darker sonorities, landscape inducing spaces, but have sections of movement where you hear beats with a lot of space between them. The beats were a framework, in a sense, like a caravan where you’re being carried across somewhere with a rhythm that’s in alignment with your heartbeat and this sensual body awareness. When you hear it live, it’s very dramatic, because I’m playing in the large cathedrals now, and then there’s a huge amount of space as the beats billow out into this 1,200-seat cathedral. Those beats are made for that kind of space.

Eventually I met up with Robert Rich, who had some really beautiful, percussive contributions early on. He was already drawn towards similar worlds that I was, and he was quite influenced by Indonesian music, bringing in this other quality of the rhythmic component that wasn’t rock based. So I would say, rhythmically, the influence of Leaving Time wasn’t so much in my music at that point. I mean, it dovetailed in with where I was going with my grooves and what Michael was doing. There was a real interchange there, but it was more the desire to bring in this primordial kind of beatscape element to the music.

Some people refer to it as a “tribal ambient” period or something, but in any case, there was a very conscious decision to start using percussion and drum machines that were tuned down lower and had massive body to them that wasn’t necessarily tonal. I wanted to move away from sequencer music because, while I love that music, it creates a matrix and grid around you that you have to really work with harmonically as it sets up scales, particular chords, and patterns that hold you in that. The beats allowed for a whole vast range of harmonic exploration where you could move in and out of zones that are congruent and floating into sound design that’s more confronting.

I understand that Dreamtime Return was also inspired by your travels to the Australian outback and studying the cultures of the aboriginal communities. Can you talk about what you brought back from those experiences?

We’ve spent a good amount of time talking about the desert and how it’s inspired me. In the mid eighties, I started to read this book, Archaeology of the dreamtime. I’d seen “The Last Wave” by Peter Weir, which was this mystical movie about the convergence between modern culture and aboriginal dreamtime mythology. I heard the didgeridoo for the first time in that movie. At the time, I was living in Venice and spending a lot of time in Joshua Tree, so I felt like there was this bridge between the Southern California deserts, Joshua Tree, and Australia. I had some kind of connection to what it felt like there, the ultimate country of deserts. The pieces on Dreamtime Return represented what the the dreamtime mean to me.

Just to take a step back, what exactly is the dreamtime?

So that’s the creation myth that many different indigenous cultures have. Their genesis story of the beginning when the land was created. The rainbow serpent, which was part of the creation of the land and the mountains and the valleys, was represented in their artwork and in their culture. I was tapping into that in a long distance kind of way from reading Archaeology of the Dreamtime. One day, I received a call from a filmmaker named David Stahl, who was working on a documentary called Art of the Dreamtime. He’d already been to Australia twice, but was going into Northern Australia to meet up with a guy named Percy Trezise who explored that area his whole life. He had become really close with this aboriginal tribe there and learned of these sacred spaces that no Western people had ever been to. Basically this documentary was born to document the Cape York region of Australia.

So David Stahl had heard Structures from Silence on the radio and somehow got my number. He said, “I’m working on this film and we’ve got a grant from Ball State University, and we’re going to take a production team into these places that no Westerners have been to film, document, and interview. Would you want to be part of this?” I mean, boom, of course! So that really took it all to a whole other level. It was like stepping into the mythology of your own life. We flew to Australia, and we’re in some of the most remote places on Earth, and they’re just incredible. We would fly into locations with a two seat helicopter, they would drop us off, and come back in two weeks. We’d be out there exploring, filming, and interviewing. Percy, who discovered these sites in a small prop plane, was doing medical runs up into the outback. He became a very prominent figure in that area for mapping out Aboriginal sites that nobody had been to since the Aboriginals left them thousands of years ago. So I was just immersing myself in that and then coming home to my studio in Venice. That’s what you hear on the album. All of that just got poured into the music.

What is your process like when you're going out to these places? How do you capture the inspiration? Field recording, note taking, photographing?

That’s a good question. At that time, I took what would be a state of the art cassette player in the mid-eighties to basically capture sonic imprints of these places where there were incredible birds and sounds. I was doing that and taking lots of photographs. More than note taking, it was about absorbing it, being as wide open as you can, and then using the audio recordings and the photographs to trigger myself back there. I brought back rocks from different areas, which you obviously weren’t supposed to do, but I would just hold them and get transported into that feeling. The rocks had this real visceral texture and quality to them at certain places where I found them. So I used all that stuff in the studio to stay connected with that feeling, but it was really the power of my memory. I mean, it was so overwhelming, in the best way. All of a sudden, you’re on the moon. It takes a day or two to get there. The amount of information that’s coming in and how you’re absorbing it – that’s the stuff that’s life changing. Getting that imprint from something that’s so absolutely powerful changes you. Sitting at the mixing board with the equipment, you stay connected to that and keep nurturing it, letting that emotion be shaped into sonic expression.

Were there any specifically aboriginal elements that you incorporated into the music?

I mean, the didgeridoo would be an obvious thing to have in there. I met David Hudson, who’s an aboriginal didgeridoo player. He was part of a dance troupe doing aboriginal performances. I met him after I just got out of the outback and explained who I was and what I was doing. I recorded his playing with that small cassette player and little Sony microphone, and that’s what got woven into the album. Then I had some field recordings, but the recordings that you hear in there of ceremonies were from Percy. I had his permission to use these ceremonies that he was part of with Dick Roughsey, an aboriginal artist and elder of the tribe. I think “Red Twilight With The Old Ones,” in particular has those recordings in there.

Amazing. So you would continue traveling around the world studying “primitive” traditions and collaborating with artists from around the world. Mexican ambient pioneer Jorge Reyes was another one of those artists. When did you meet him and how did those collaborations come together?

So I was invited to play at a festival in the Canary Islands in 1990 on Lanzarote, which has this amazing grotto that used to be a volcanic lava tube. They turn it into a performance venue for 700 people. The year before, Eno and his label did a piece there on the island. We happened to be there the week that the Gulf War started so we were flying right into the war. When we landed in Madrid, there were tanks and weaponry all around the American airplanes in the airport. In any case, we made it to Lanzarote, and it’s paradise. Jorge was there along with Suso Saiz, Robert Rich, and Stephan Micus.

We were all there for this festival, but this one German guy couldn’t get out of Germany because of the war. So the promoter asked Jorge, Suso, and I if we would play a set together in place of him. We met about 3 hours before and said, “Yeah, let’s do it,” and then we just stepped off the plank. It was amazing. We were playing, and I’m moving my hands because I thought that was me, but it was Suso. We were just like one unit. Jorge had already Dreamtime Return, and I had heard his Comala album, so we knew of each other, but when we were there together we just bonded instantly. From that moment, for about three years, we were a team doing concerts in Europe. We played an amazing festival in Osterbrook, Germany together, and I spent a good deal of time with Jorge in Mexico.

We did one festival in an outdoor arena that had 64 stone monoliths people would climb up onto. It was in a volcanic lava bed and you could get 10,000 people there. That’s the kind of stuff you would do with Jorge; he was a force of nature. We were really close and exchanged a lot of inspiration. He gave me the pre-Hispanic instruments that I still use at every concert now. It’s like I bring Jorge’s spirit into the set with me because, you know, he passed away years ago. That was just another one of those synchronous moments that somehow gets set up by being alive, taking chances, and going out in the world. There’s a certain amount of risk and danger, but without that, the whole course of my collaborations with him and the development of parts of my music would never have happened. These collaborations feel connected to my whole path as an artist.

You've gone through a long journey with electronic and "ambient" music. How do you feel about the state of ambient music today? It seems to have developed and become more popular in recent years, especially post-pandemic.

it’s absolutely exciting and great to see it evolving in the way that it is. It’s no longer hidden out in the corners. I mean, we could finish the interview and go on Amazon, build a Eurorack system for $2,000, and have it here in two days. That availability of the instruments for all kinds of people to explore sound, expand your boundaries, and be creative and expressive is great. To me, that’s a really big, positive piece around electronic based music now — that’s it’s just democratic. You no longer have to spend years to woodshed to do guitar music, or whatever. There’s an incredible circuit of people who are non-musicians plugging in and doing brilliant stuff.

In the beginning, I had really no support or anyone encouraging that. Most people thought I was just off the deep end somewhere just making strange sounds in a room. Now it’s not necessarily like that. I couldn’t think of a better time on the planet to be connected into the electronic arts visually and musically. It’s a great thing that electronic music is breaking down what used to be more defined boundaries between genres, as well.

Lastly, you’ll be performing in Joshua Tree in October. What’s your setup going to be like for this show?

This set is going to be a celebration of the all the concerts I’ve been doing all over the country this year. Since I’m traveling on the ground, I’m able to bring the special tools out that I never really get to fly with. It’s going to be an extended, ten-hour event, at least. First, I’ll do a three hour set in a great space in surround sound with the Mobius crew. You’ll get the absolute full dosage of everything that I live to do in those 3 hours. Then we’ll have a space between with some DJs keeping the energy moving. Then I’ll come back at 2:00 a.m. and play until sunrise. I’m going to go deep, immersive, into a deep trance. I have beautiful trajectory for that. If you’re in the LA area and you appreciate what I do, then you really need to be there for this.