Steve Roach – Long Thoughts

1 review for Steve Roach – Long Thoughts

1. 

   Sylvain Lupari – 2022-11-22

   How to describe Long Thoughts without my words turn into the pleonasm? I would like to be like Steve Roach and to write texts on the same theme. Texts which are alike and which nevertheless reveal subtle nuances in the prose and in the choice of the words so that I could captivate and charm constantly my faithful readers. A thing that Steve Roach does since ages and that he still doing with this other journey in the spiritual lands of our subconscious. Nevertheless, this long journey of 73 minutes borrows corridors that we visited repeatedly with albums such as Fade to Gray, Shadow of Time, This Place to Be and the mega 4 CD box Bloodmoon Rising. These transcendental symphonies were all released in 2015 and assured the longevity of ambient works as much immersive, one from the others. We have to think of the Immersion series and of the multitude of albums segmented in several titles and which are also long rivers of meditative atmospheres s uch as this last Steve Roach’s opus. The peculiarity of Long Thoughts is to be as much intuitive as its title. I really had this impression to scatter my thoughts in long solitary journeys over a red desert or over a magma frozen in a blue steel. From a simple breeze, a multiplication of layers, quite unique one from the others, irradiates our ears. These layers get tangled and get untie like a thick cloud of shadows practicing diverse sexual intercourses on a reddish mass. They adopt the same tangent, but not the same illusion, and regroup in a sonic heap strongly divided between celestial and sibylline approaches. Some corrosive effects color the depth of the ambient choir with outlines which crackle over the stains of the shadows which are whistling like hollow winds. If there is an effect of harmony, it lives in these layers of white noises which sizzle in symbiosis with a mutation of the dark breezes which turn into bloodless humming. Long Thoughts too could have be divide d into segments, so much that we feel here a clear detachment between the vibes of these thoughts which can be as much serene than furious. And I liked this fascinating confrontation between these nuances which makes that this other ambient soundscape of Steve Roach looks as much different than its inevitable links between his previous transcendental meditation works which are a part of Steve’s DNA and, by ricochet, of his legion of apostles.

   Similar but not completely alike to some of Steve Roach’s previous works, Long Thoughts is like this annual pilgrimage with a musician who knows how to extend the reach of his works beyond the territories of our needs. Similar but not completely, Long Thoughts will charm more than one with its strange oratorios which hum in a hallucinating embellishment where the sonic and musical frontiers encircle us like hands caressing our soul, the core of our emotions.

   2019. Sylvain Lupari