“What there is to say except that This Place to Be is yet another triumph from the master of ambient music”
1 This Place to Be 74:00 Timeroom Editions TM38
(CD/DDL 74:00) (V.F.) (Deep ambient music)
Created following the mega project of black and meditative atmospheres inspired by lunar eclipses Bloodmoon Rising, THIS PLACE TO BE has landed in the interstices of the Internet in last May. The album was first offered to all for a moderate sum of you give what you want. The pressure of its success changed its face by turning for a real manufactured CD masterised by none other than Howard Givens, the man behind Spotted Peccary. And surprise! THIS PLACE TO BE was pulled out from time in order to answer to the genesis of Shadow of Time, Steve Roach's next album which should appear on the Projekt Records label at the end of August 2016. What we have to retain from this story? That nevertheless his albums of ambient, dark and meditative music, Steve Roach keeps improving the formula, keeps making the kind evolve.
A distant breath of voice which is transformed into a halo of murmurs to the iridescent colors, This Place to Be begins its long trip of 74 minutes with a so spectral approach than cosmic. The sounds and tones which interlace together belong to both universes of which the slow impetus of gravity are cracking the untraceable breach between the afterlife and the cosmos. The hummings of drones give a viscous appearance to this sibylline envelope from where comes from all sides a thick cloud of heterogeneous noises which crash on a lantern of sounds like moths of which the agony we film in slow motion. It's very enveloping, but also very disturbing due to the intense supernatural reach. The movement bifurcates in a long cave where are whistling the walls pierced by the erosion. One would say a concert of redeeming souls in the gutter of a hell without forgiveness. Yes! Enveloping and disturbing, although some will find the doors of a new serenity there. That always depends on the ears which hear it. Me, I hear a profound sadness to cut out through the fates of the enthusiasm. And always we fall in this endless whirlwind where the blackness wraps the deficiencies of our society without rest. There where this blackness and its endless hole spits out us in order to create again the next stages of our universe. We burn ourselves there again and again? Not serious, we always have Steve Roach to help us to recovered.
Sylvain Lupari (August 12th, 2016) *****
Available at Timeroom Direct Bandcamp