The Reverent Sky reaffirms Roach’s status as (inter-)stellar sonic explorer, layering various strands of his stylistic armory into a mesmeric tableau of oneiric ambience offset with a timeless pulse.
Stretches of harmonic strata and spectral melody
For adepts of Steve Roach‘s soundworld the sky in all its protean nature is a familiar leitmotif from over five decades of his work. Latest installment, The Reverent Sky, has four stretches of harmonic strata and spectral melody extend in enveloping swathes with occasional rhythmic infusions, articulating, in Roachean pukka, “a yearning to merge into infinite realms of epiphany and expansion.“
Crafted in his Timehouse studio on a desert ridgetop looking out onto a vast horizon, The Reverent Sky reflects Roach’s ongoing dialogue with the extra-studio world, an artistic process “shaped by the panoramic vistas outside and the unbound inspiration within.” The music is infused with the phase shifts at its heart—daybreak’s light to vespertine, sunrise to sunset and its aetherial movement to the nocturnal. Dynamic-emotive spectra reveal a strong sense of beauty and grace, mystery and longing in what Roach dubs “essentialism,” “retaining only what is vital and essential to the creation of each piece as a pure and deeply emotive sonic sensory experience,” a style whose evolution is evident in recent works like Rest of Life, As it Is, Reflections in Repose and One Day of Forever.
Undulations dawn and dissolve like first light loops over land ::
As the title track’s harmonic undulations dawn and dissolve like first light loops over land, navigating The Reverent Sky’s long-form quartet feels like experiencing the eponymous entity in its elemental moods. A sense of infinity emerges as microtonalities circulate in celestial Brownian motion; euphonic otherworldly transport, moving within and without and between, low-end pressure and a diaphanous array of sonic vectors. “Sensual Sonic” sustains the immersion, adding a percussive undercurrent, iridescent swirls and environmentalia upwelling along the way. “The Nurturing Ground” comes on like a geological exhalation from the desert itself, oblique rhythms emergent from the void (magnificent, natch) like slo-mo tides, as much sensed as heard, wrought from future-arcane artifacts. “Heart of Compassion” closes in the most luminous fusion of melody and ambience with a sense of resolution, a tenor akin to the opener’s, its sounds more recondite, psychoactive, cycling between sound planes.
In sum, The Reverent Sky reaffirms Roach’s status as (inter-)stellar sonic explorer, layering various strands of his stylistic armory into a mesmeric tableau of oneiric ambience offset with a timeless pulse. Like all his best work, it “connects and expresses the world around us and the realms within,” not demanding so much as offering itself—to be dwelt inside, to let its drifting expanses transport us.
The Reverent Sky is available on Projekt. [Bandcamp]
