BLOODMOON RISING

Steve Roach

Progressive Electronic

3.91 | 8 ratings

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Dobermensch
Prog Reviewer

Old Steve certainly knows how to create and maintain an atmosphere. At a whopping 70 minutes this one track is trademark 'Roach'.

Layers of 'high decay' synths are placed on top of one another producing an elongated drone throughout 'Bloodmoon Rising'. As always, his choice of patches are excellent. It would be easy if left in the hands of other ambient artists to make this sound really cheesy and corny.

As it is, there's something quite majestic and other-worldly about this and many of his recent releases. It's beatless, of course, but has a wonderful sense of space. It can be listened to as the soundtrack to the outer Solar System 'Oort Cloud', or as an unbearably hot day in the Atacama desert in Chile.

There's something very organic sounding, despite it being wholly electronic. Perhaps it's because some of the chords are so elongated that they begin to sound like slowed down vocals.

Being one of my favourite sights in the sky, a full blood moon would appear to be something very startling and unsettling indeed if you didn't know the science behind it. This recording sums it up well... It's a calm, beautiful, eerie and somewhat malevolent spectacle that can only be witnessed when the moon is very low in the sky where the earths atmosphere is at its thickest from an observers point of view. It's basically the scattering of sunlight through the earths atmosphere, the same effect that causes sunsets to appear red.

A valid criticism may be that he's released an awful lot of similar albums where you'd be hard pressed to identify the album if you listened to it in random shuffle. But it's just too pretty to give anything less than 4 stars. I do like the direction he's taken during the past few years, dropping the percussion, ritualistic beats, occasional sequencers along with those awfully embarrassing New Age flutes he used to swear by. 'Bloodmoon Rising' will be an ageless recording - looked back on in decades to come where I can easily see it still being relevant and not just 'of it's time'

Dobermensch | 4/5 | 2015-4-30

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