Steve Roach – Life in the Soundcurrent – a new documentary by Kurt Lancaster, is now available to stream via Vimeo.
Roach is a pioneering ambient/space music artist, with a deep discography of albums, focusing on evolving soundscapes, created with a synthesizers and other electronic music gear, percussion, didgeridoo and other instruments.
Here’s the official preview:
Video Summary:
“A man overwhelmed by the cacophony of everyday life turns to the desert to find peace, which inspires him to create music from what he refers to as the “soundcurrent.” Two hundred albums later (along with two Grammy nominations), he reflects on his life, loss, and process in what it means to sculpt sound from desert spaces.”
You can also find the documentary at Amazon Prime. (US & UK).
The Man, The Legend, Brilliant 🙂
PS; Vimeo is really odd platform to post it on…
Is Roach generally liked? Whenever I hear a particularly nasty (to my ears) track on soma.fm and move to switch channels, almost every time it’s a Steve Roach track. Cold, unmusical — and I’m pretty far gone on the spectrum of experimental ambient —
Not sure who is ‘generally liked’ in the ambient area. It’s a niche within a niche. Maybe ‘Eno’?
Roach is one of the masters of ambient space music – but maybe that’s just not your thing.
He’s brilliant at creating soundscapes and hypnotic sequencers. He definitely avoids traditional melodies and new age cliches, though.
Steve roach is ambient God. It is easy to overlook his work but the more you listen, the greater the reward, especially for his work with drones and deeper side of ambient style., I recommend “structures from silence”, “western spaces”, “Dreamtime return”, “new life dreaming” and “deeper silence”.
He may not have the mainstream prominence of Brian Eno or Aphex Twin but his catalogue of ambient music is far greater.
A favorite of mine was the collaboration album Strata, with Robert Rich