INVISIBLE

2015 saw an early gift in the form of a new Steve Roach album `Invisible', released on January 1st. With the momentum of the previous year still maintaining for the ambient artist, he spent the last few cold and rainy days of 2014 creating a new long-form piece, and as expected, it's a consistent and immersive experience, from an artist known for thoughtful and subtle unwinding compositions. While a drone piece at heart, it also includes little restrained elements of tribal music, plenty of dark ambient movements and some very unexpected (yet welcome!) deep bass grooves lurking in a few spots as well.

Comprised on one single track running just over 58 minutes, `Invisible' is quite a dark and brooding work. Gloomy synths groan away like an approaching building storm, little electronic glistenings trying to pierce through. They throb and reverberate with life and movement, as a pattering of low-key tribal beats gently rise up from the earth, and soothing electronic wisps slowly extend fingertips out to glide between a metallic sheen mixed with earthly barren desert. Machine-like oscillations grow in power over desolate winds, hallucinatory shimmerings dance before our eyes, bending distorted guitar ruminations twist and spiral over emerging deep bass liquid percussive loops that pour all around. Bubbling grooves fall like rain over the land, and waking signs of new life snake across the surface, carried forth by uplifting and hopeful synth strains weaving a final protective spell.

Available exclusively as a free Bandcamp download at this point, Mr Roach also promises a long list of new releases to follow this one throughout 2015, some brand new, others that have been in production for some years. `Invisible' is not the easiest of ambient releases to appreciate, and those not used to (or not fans of) subtle drone-type music should approach this one with caution. It may not do a lot that the artist hasn't offered before, and some early stretches of the piece are a little uneventful, but for listeners who appreciate this particular sub-genre of electronic/ambient music, that have the patience to listen quietly, this is a very worthwhile release, and incredibly good value considering it's current price.

Three stars. This captivating, initially confronting piece is ideal late night contemplative listening.

The creative streak goes on!

Well, Steve Roach's quest for musical perfection steps forward with this astounding New Year's surprise. "Invisible", 2015, is a single 58 minute composition, which takes on where the "Delicate Forever" 2014, left, but also brings on a more obscure direction.

This hypnotic, low keyed but enormously rich in electronically generated, minimal instrumentation and ideas work, is certainly suitable for meditation rather than euphoria, but it is game if used accordingly. The expansive and very-deep (for real), ever changing atmospheres, are focused and still quiet experimental in their borderless expansions. To say the least, Steve Roach's experimentations at this point of his musical career, could be any other musician's dream to achieve single musical idiom. That is how rich Steve Roach's personal efforts have grown in in his self-aquired musical universe.

A sophisticated progressive electronic/acoustic musical drone-like nocturnal thread which opposite to its title, is more than once quiet visible and even disturbing and nightmarish, but perfectly balanced with shades of contrasts by the use of different atmospheric constructions, I insist, which enriches each of the moving and transforming passages, contained in this single voyage.

So AMBIENT as such it is not. Let's say it is a subtle encounter with all of Steve Roach's darker discoveries put up in a single place, where you can dwell freely, but where it is impossible to escape the inhospitable but inviting and mysterious cosmic landscapes, (And to be honest you would not exactly will like to escape, rather the opposite).

Expect Steve Roach's DARKER compositional skills at its finest and a pre-view of what this musician has yet to offer.

****4.5 "Genius at work, do not disturb" PA stars.