Steve Roach - Etheric Imprints (2015)

Mesmerizing soundworlds from an artist immersed in the sensual realms of electronic/ambient sonic creation. Steve Roach dives further into the deep end of introspective music on this atmospheric set. Focusing on the essential elements of sound, silence, tone, and time-altering forms, the four long-form pieces are a lens to view the molecules of emotion and enhanced perception. Peeling away the surface layers to reveal the subterranean strata beneath, Etheric Imprints brings into form a contained sense of stillness and reflection.

Reaching towards a new voice in Roach’s vocabulary of expressing the ineffable, the twenty-eight-minute title track was created with an highly processed electric grand piano as the main voice. Performing in real time and responding to an expansive electro-acoustic environment, Roach profoundly shapes and molds musical space and tone in his hands. In this piece, moments of stillness arise like waves of flow and ebb while a substratum of analog modular synth zones provides a constant, slowly shifting undercurrent of mystery and harmonic interplay.

The ethereal, ghost-like forms of the cover art perfectly capture the subtle sense of expanded body-spirit awareness the music evokes. Meditations upon Tuyen Q. Nguyen’s artwork during the creative process helped inspire a new pathway into places beyond The Delicate Forever, Steve’s previous atmospheric release. Etheric Imprints evokes an aural phenomena that seems to float and hover, expanding and dissipating before our very ears. A kind of Rorschach test for the auditory senses that can offer a different imprint at every listen; what we bring to it completes the experience. This music – like the artist himself – lives in the center of a soundworld that knows no boundaries.

Best described as “elegant minimalism,” Etheric Imprints offers a deeper listening into the nuance of now by way of the power of sound.