Steve Roach – Destination beyond

4 reviews for Steve Roach – Destination beyond

1. 

   Hypnagogue – 2022-11-22

   In its scope and tone, Destination Beyond beautifully bridges the breadth of Roachs career.

   The sequencer work carries echoes of his high-energy early releases and his love of hands-on sound creation, while the breathier, more meditative spaces are the signature of Roachs adeptness at taking us quietly inside ourselves.

   2009. Hypnagogue

2. 

   Music Tap – 2022-11-22

   In decades past, a band known as Tangerine Dream created incredible suites of music unveiled as albums, many of which are considered classic to this day. Their innovative and synthesized compositions laid the groundwork for what is now known as ambient music. They left behind Stratosfear, Phaedra, Alpha Centauri, Ricochet, even the fantastic soundtrack to Sorcerer. They explored further the limits of the developing genre further with classic albums like Cyclone, and Force Majeure before becoming too saccharine for die-hard fans’ musical ears.
   Steve Roach is perhaps the one significant ambient artist that has explored the Tangerine Dream template, modifying along the way to great success. His expanded layering has created a mass of excellent albums, many that can put a finger directly on the pulse of the Tangerine Dream legacy.
   His latest release, Destination Beyond, is a single composition clocking in at 71+ minutes.

   It begins softly before developing into a pulsing grand darkness that is eerie yet inviting. It lures you into a complete, uninterrupted span of mental ‘traveling discoveries’ reminiscent of not only TD‘s Sorcerer, but also of TD‘s Stratofear (at points).
   Steve Roach has thematically called this album a soundtrack of forward movement. He calls it a …magnetic pull and drive towards the point on the horizon

3. 

   Sylvain Lupari / Guts Of Darkness – 2022-11-22

   The western musical synthesized wind sweeps dry dunes and flies over, as the shadows of American eagles, the vestiges of a world where the sonorous poetry is the meeting point between the breaths of an ethereal daydreaming to flexible and skin-tight rhythms of a spiritual trance. With Destination Beyond, Steve Roach pursues his quest for a transcendental music which mixes the Zen beliefs to hypnotico-trances rhythms with ruse clothings that cogitate in an elixir of serenity. A skillful mixture of the sweet and dark tranquility of Dynamic Stillness to the stormy, but well controlled, agitation of Arc of Passion. Simply divine!

   A dark and slightly fleeing soundwave opens the first measures of Destination Beyond which extends to a long epic title of 72 minutes. The synth is of crystalline breaths which hoot with elegance through stigmas of a fanciful desert. Soon we perceive its captivating and rippling sublime stratas which characterized the magnificent and out of print Western Spaces released on Innovative Communication in 1986. The sonority is so close that we cant ignore the resemblance and we are letting ourselves overrun by this soft sound influx which broods increasing pulsations to sidewinder terminations that entangle with a balanced loudness with layers of angelic sonorities.
   Steve Roach‘s world evolves with its musical convictions. Here, there is no salute to musical atomism. Destination Beyond teems of a life full of powerful oscillations which are gobbled up by slinky and crystalline stratas to morphic roundnesss. But the intensity of its sound ethereal layers dont deaden nor keep silent the resonances and pit viper pulsations which abound in this acoustic fauna where diversity timbers are so complex to this American musical synthesist fetes.
   Of course, everything is not similar, nor linear. Steve Roach brings subtle variances where the rhythm isolates itself, bringing a movement of sweet hypnotic trance, and sometimes disappears to leave the entire place to superb and smooth layers which wind around in a cerebral cortex high in phonic forms. By moments, this poetic tenderness is going violent and is making justice with a so elongated linearity that we getting near Morpheus arms.

   In brief, another stroke of genius by Steve Roach which years after years continues to amaze on the same sound themes, but with so tempestuous approaches that the sweetness can allow it. Destination Beyond is a magnificent introspective journey which flows with all the poetry and the wisdom of the master of music thought and conceived to be heard with the tranquility of its movements.

   2009. Sylvain Lupari / Guts Of Darkness

4. 

   Phil Derby / Electroambient Space – 2022-11-22

   One begins to wonder how many albums Steve Roach can create in his lifetime, not to mention how many that are comprised of a single track running an hour or more. Lest you think that might get old, or formulaic, think again. Destination Beyond is yet another feather in Roachs proverbial cap.

   While Steves longform works are usually quite minimal, this is an active, ever-changing piece, along the lines of Proof Positive although a touch mellower than that. A pulsing bass line forms the foundation as warm pads float over the top and cool grooves complete the package. At times the bass drops out to allow more space to breathe, most notably from about 32:00 to 45:00, as pure space music floats by for several minutes. For the most part, however, the energy is never very far away. But it is a kind of energy that calms and mesmerizes rather than stimulates.

   Although suggestive of a world always on the move, Destination Beyond is a reminder that we can take time out to relax and contemplate as well.

   2009. Phil Derby / Electroambient Space