STRUCTURES FROM SILENCE

I have a confession to make here: the expectations under which I purchased Structures from Silence impacted my initial opinion of it. In short, the album wasn't at all what I expected - - it was much less, in fact. I don't think that this impacts my review here, coming as it does more than ten years later, but it seems fair to mention that in researching artists whose music I might enjoy as much as the early period of my beloved Klaus Schulze, the name Steve Roach came up. And, in different, but overlapping research, I heard of the intriguing Steve Reich. Later, in 2008, I came across Structures from Silence on itunes. I gave it a quick preview, and made an impulse buy.

Oops.

My bad. The interestingly titled Structures from Silence turned out to be the most new-agey album I would ever listen to more than once. In and of itself, New Age music isn't bad, but as Schulze and others have proved, it is certainly possible to create long, evolving, non-virtuosic synthesizer pieces that are also challenging and rewarding to the listener.

Structures from Silence is, unfortunately, none of this. When he wanders a bit from an ordinary scale, Roach nonetheless leans toward resolutions in unsurprising, off-the-shelf chords. Most of the album seems to be built upon regularly changing chords played on synthesizer pads - - and even if the chord progressions aren't always predictable, the structure is formulaic.

I can see where such regularity may be a positive quality to some listeners, and perhaps most. Indeed, Roach has many fans, many of whom are undoubtedly discerning. In my case, Structures from Silence is likely to be the only Steve Roach work I listen to closely. If his other works are significantly better, I'd argue that my rating of one star is appropriate insofar as such a rating indicates an album for completists.