Streams & Currents

Album Review

For nearly three decades Steve Roach has approached the spiritual, atmospheric, poetic, and textural possibilities of sound. First sequencers and keyboards, then organic and aboriginal percussion instruments, tape and digital loops, and even different geographic and energetic centers all became part of the process Roach developed for getting silence to give up its secrets. Beginning with his last album, Roach began to evolve once again. He began using the electric guitar and recording live in his Timeroom studio. He was interested in allowing the moment to dictate itself to him in the wake of silence. In other words, if silence decided to speak through a pair of electric guitars and an E-Bow, what would it say to the one playing them? This engagement with silence is not academic, as these six pieces demonstrate without overdubs and in real time over two sessions. This isn't merely ambient exploration, but more ambient articulation of a moment, a passing glance at whatever reveals itself before disappearing into the ether that becomes the whole. Roach here is, as much as is humanly possible, a tabula rasa, a blank slate who moves in response to the moment, not predicating it. The drift and gauzy wash of the music is an unfolding of a whole where what gets revealed is so gradual, both performer and listener are wrapped up in its every shimmering instant. On the 28-and-a-half-minute "Spirit Moves," where an actual rhythm appears, it's merely a device to allow the decompression of that moment where music becomes thought, deed, and continuum, and creates a mantra-like space temporarily before giving way to the lush lure of silence as well. Articulation is never a fixed place in time, but rather a fluid, breathing sphere of wash and whisper. From the opening phrases of Streams & Currents, where the present moment is all the future there is devoid of any past — because it has been claimed by silence — to its nadir on "Flow," where all sounds become indistinguishable in the glistening babble of shimmer and heat, Steve Roach has accomplished the acrobatic of the translator in that he has remained in the moment in order to articulate it to a future that can observe it as a past, all in the stillness of a solitary nuance from the presence of silence.