STRUCTURES FROM SILENCE

It's ok. I'm not thrilled by this but it's a pleasant enough listen. I've just heard much better progressive electronic that really gets me into it. This is a little tame and repetitive like yoga or massage music or something. If that's what you're looking for then you will like this a lot. For me, I prefer just a little more oompf even in my ambient music. Some of my favorite ambient music exists in not only artists like Tangerine Dream but also on the 5 disc series "From Here To Tranquility." There is more going on than just repetitive ambient structures. I don't remember which, but I have heard better even from Steve Roach himself.

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.

I always find ambient music to be one of the hardest genres to write for. Due to the lack of any really noticeable musical structure, most of it boils down to how the music feels, more than how it feels. It is a more textural genre. That being said, I think Steve Roach does a fine job in conveying a more textural experience. Sorry for my digression, but I have always been fascinated by Steve Roach, but never got around to actually listening to them. That has been changed.

If there is one mood that conveys this album well, it is loneliness. These reverberated notes and these space sounding textures all express a lonely-sentimental value that enhances the 3 songs off the album. It creates a highly moody atmosphere in the seams of the album. I feel like this is the album's biggest strong suit, just how it goes to these more melancholic passages of drone and synths that places a huge emphasis on the listener's emotions.

I have to say though, that this isn't really the most groundbreaking ambient album I have heard. It kinda feels like the rest of the stuff I heard from the genre, since all ambient records basically have one goal in mind: emphasizing moods over typical sound structure. This makes the genre easy to get into, but also kinda tricky to find something REALLY new. Structures From Silence doesn't bring anything new to the table, which is kind of a shame as this is generally considered a really good ambient record to many people, but I simply don't quite see it even after a bunch of listens.

A perfectly fine ambient record, but not one that gets me salivating for more of Roach's material. He is clearly good with his crafts, but he doesn't spark much originality in his wake.