Steve Roach - darkest before dawn
Steve Roach's work has been an interesting introduction for me to this highly purist form of ambient music, despite my mundane motivation for this purchase (it is extremely good value on pay-per-track download services!) It's one single piece stretched to the maximum length of a CD, 74 minutes of soft, dark noise. Its purely electronic sounds evoke the void of outer or inner space, with an eerie remoteness from any signs of life. On the surface there's not much going on, but it's difficult to isolate all the constituents of the sound. It's almost certainly just a few loops of gradually shifting notes, aligned to create a strange sort of harmony. But just as the imagination might conjure shapes from visual darkness, listening closely you might hear something subtly different at each point, and become alert to how external noises blend into the record's shades of black.
June 5, 2008
See blog entry: Dark Ambient (17 Jun, 2008)
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