| Artist: Steve Roach Album: Life Sequence Label: Timeroom Editions | 
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Life Sequence (73'37") stands in stark relief against the transcendent depths of Steve Roach's more atmospheric/textural works. The music found on this collection is designed to propel the listener endlessly through a trackless void, creating our own space as we fly. The music is searching, tremulous and expectant while being enigmatic, limitless and empyreal - at once personal and universal. Life Sequence groups together five studio tracks from significantly different points along the arc of Roach's eminent career in electronic music. What ties this album together is not just the hardware, the analog style step sequencer and its seemingly endless facility for composition, repetition and variation; but the fidelity and expanse of these realizations. We are entranced through Roach's crisscrossing of fractured rhythms and blip patterns, enthralled at the interplay of complex layering and multifaceted patterns and entangled in the kaleidoscopic mutations of the music's pulse. The beauty of these works comes from its many strands, heard individually and comprehended collectively - in the way we come to admire a large tapestry from a swatch of its fabric. Life Sequence is an album of tomorrow's music masquerading as yesterday's rage. Here Roach renders into musical form his concept of rhythmic unity and timeless space. In spite of Roach's music having been borrowed from so many times, this vital artist still has the power to inspire and move.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 21 November 2003 | |
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