“Here you have the best of Steve Roach's both worlds of the early 80's with a slightly sequenced beat and a long form of deep ambient music”
1 Emotion Revealed 24:46 2 Firelight 26:23 Projekt | PROJEKT324
(CD/DDL 51:09) (V.F.)
(Ambient and sequenced EM)
At the beginning of the 80's, Steve Roach was torn between the influences of the Berlin School sequencer-based EM and the so said ambient music which was strongly inspired by his moments of meditation in the American deserts. This last style got the upper hand over the movements led by stormy sequences which nevertheless gave powerful albums such as Now & Traveller, although this album turns out to be a good dosage between his two forms of EM, Empetus and the huge Stormwarning. It's exactly in this period that is situated EMOTION REVEALED. Discovered by chance in 2015, the music of this last Steve Roach's opus was written and recorded in 1983 between Empetus and Structures from Silence, two albums that have propelled Steve Roach in the firmament of the big names of contemporary EM.
The movement is delicate! Small sequences sparkle and flash, as if they were frozen in suspension, reminding the very soft ethereal introduction of the superb Reflections in Suspension; this first track which caught our sense of hearing towards the traps of seduction in Structures from Silence. There isn't 2 minutes to the meter that the magic already operates. Synth layers harmonize their caresses with the oscillatory circles of beat of the title-track, floating and circulating between spheres, whereas that some delicate percussions and a bass line forge a structure of riffs which swirl in a gyrating way all around this upward movement of Emotion Revealed. Behind this melodious pattern of ambient rhythm hides a subtle tribal hymn where the tears of synth sing such as shamans in state of incantation. The senses in hypnosis, we notice hardly that the line of riffs increases its presence, accelerating even the pace, while the harmonious rhythm of sequences becomes weakened by a more and more omnipresent background. The envelope is rich, and we are in another state of mind. This is when the long movement is changing subtly the pace. Giving back to these sequences which roll in loops, like balls of sonic dusts roaming in the desert, their initial charms which shine in the singings of the synths which are splendidly mesmerizing. It's quite a track my friends! Recorded live in the Timeroom studio in 1983, I just don't understand that it was simply lost for more than 30 years... Firelight was recorded one year earlier, always in Culver City's Timeroom studio in California for an exhibition of the artist Rita Yokoi. It's a very quiet track where the slow reverberations of the synth lines are floating with other more musical lines and among scattered felted explosions. We can hear voices getting out from the slow layers of drones just like atmospheric noises and spotted ringings here and there which seem lost in this immense cloth of quiet hummings. It's very wrapping and it plunges me inevitably into the atmospheres of Structures from Silence.
EMOTION REVEALED presents to us both sides of an era when Steve Roach emerged quietly on the world scene of EM. If the title-track reveals an influence of the ambient and hypnotic rhythms of the Berlin School, with on the other hand a unique signature for the tribal atmospheres, Firelight already illustrates all the influence of Steve Roach on senses with a meditative and very penetrating EM. It's the best of both worlds of Roach in one album. And it's, according to me, the best way of discovering all the dimension of a unique artist who in spite of all decades managed to maintain its rank of inescapable face of contemporary EM since almost 35 years! A real tour de force which says all.
Sylvain Lupari (February 18th, 2016) *****
Available at Projekt Records Bandcamp