Bloom Ascension

Bloom Ascension – Projekt Records

Go to the Timeroom, you will discover that time itself has new meanings. You will never fully return, and you will proceed forward enriched with treasures in the form of new dreams.

1. About Steve Roach

A career that spans 4 decades

The electronic music that Steve Roach pioneered and helped define over the past 40 years has led to the development of whole genres of electronic music, including tribal ambient, ambient atmospheric, ambient electronic, immersive, and drone soundscapes. He sets up cycling layers of electronic sounds and allows them to take us where they go. They fade in, you meet eternity, and after a time the track fades out. Somehow his recordings always manage to fit infinity onto the recording medium.

Bloom Ascension is a collection of four songs that are all sequencer based. The sequencers are weaving patterns that repeat in layered cycles, opening cosmic doors the way drones do. They are leading the intrepid listener to reach a hypnotic sense of bliss and absorption. And they do so, with spiraling vibrating patterns and endless small details to explore and discover. This is superb music for dreaming. These four tracks together create a single symmetrical audio mandala, for meditation, and for experiencing the cosmos in nocturnal visions.

Steve Roach’s Ambient Church Concert

Bloom Ascension was released in digital forms (streaming, MP3, FLAC, and audiophile) on August 17, 2019. Physical formats (vinyl, audio cassette and CD) were available at Steve Roach’s Ambient Church Concert in Los Angeles, on August 30, 2019.

Throughout the Ambient Church performance of his wide dynamic range of work, the First United Methodist Church of Pasadena with its gothic style chapel, open beam ceiling, amphitheater sanctuary, pipe organ and glowing stained glass windows, will be the backdrop of immersive, architecturally mapped projections. Ambient Church is a nomadic experiential event series dedicated to working with artists to bring new ecologies to architecturally unique spaces through transcendent audio and visual performance.

Inspiration

Inspired by Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Vangelis in the 1970s Steve Roach made a strategic and intuitive career move from airborn maneuvers in motocross and taught himself how to play synthesizers to reach for the thrilling and dazzling atmospheric heights of electronic music. He taught himself because he knew exactly what he wanted to do and waiting for his turn in a classroom would not allow him to achieve what he has accomplished. He knew this when he started. Also, he has two Grammy nominations, for Spiral Revelation (2017) and Molecules of Motion (2018). He began his epic now 40-year journey into electronica working with other pioneers such as the Swiss-born electronic musician Dieter Moebius, releasing an album on Moonwind Records in 1979 titled Moebius. His first solo album was Now (1982) followed by Structures from Silence (1984) and the Quiet Music series in 1986.

Dreamtime Return (1988) was one of the most significant albums of its kind to hit the market. Also, it was praised by Linda Kohanov who said of the album: “At the core of the Los Angeles-based artist’s compelling style is his uncanny ability to create the illusion of suspended time. Altered chords that breathe ever so slowly, floating textures, digitally sampled aboriginal timbres, and arresting special effects lead you through a gently unfolding maze of sonic dimensions that depict a sense of mystery and confrontation with the unknown.”

Collaborators

Bloom Ascension is entirely electronic, but the repository of musical treasure found coming from the Timeroom is as spectacular and complex as the Tucson wilderness oasis where Steve Roach now makes his home. He has visited Australia numerous times, perhaps he has returned to that exotic and distant place after lifetimes spent living and dreaming there, where he added the mysterious sound of the didgeridoo to his repertoire of fantastic euphonic instrumentalisms. His work with the musician Jorge Reyes introduced Prehispanic musical elements to his sonic palette and developed an organic electronic fusion style now called tribal-ambient.

Other collaborators include Avant Garden, Biff Johnson, Brain Laughter, Brian Parnham, Byron Metcalf, Daniel Blanchet, Djam Karet, Douglas Spotted Eagle, Erik Wøllo, Forrest Fang, Justin Vanderberg, Kelly David, Kit Watkins, Lee Underwood, Loren Nerell, Lustmord, Lycia, Ma Ja Le, Perry Silverbird, Peter Grenader, Robert Rich, Ross LewAllen, Solitaire (Elmar Schulte), Takadja, Temps Perdu?, Thom Brennan, and Walter Holland. His Timeroom catalog includes over 150 titles and his albums can be accessed and purchased on Projekt Records and his own website.

The music on Bloom Ascension

Bloom Ascension is an album full of lightly dancing rapid rhythmic intricate patterns. They are endlessly swirling while overseen by searching spotlight fingers of tones, complicated weaving and blending, layered currents and subcurrents. Imagine a whole landscape of busy forms creating and shaping speckled structures made of smaller particles. Imagine colors you have never seen before, rotating and spiraling in new ornamentations. Then imagine inhabiting a single cell in a vast four-dimensional mosaic forest of light and sound. Imagine blooming flowers rising straight up into the sunrise and rainbows reflected on the dew. The pattern repeats and builds, always the same and never the same. It’s simultaneously energizing and soothing, infinite and yet portable. Somehow these are not contradictions, this is my simple observation.

2. Links

Where to buy Bloom Ascension?

Official website Steve Roach
Timeroom Direct
Projekt Records

More info about Steve Roach

Ambient Church
Wikipedia
Facebook
Discogs

 
Written by Robin James, August 29th, 2019