"Ritual Ground" (1993) is the collaboration between Steve Roach and Elmar Schulte.
The album is a spontaneous sonic combustion, rich in cinematic overtones, deep atmospheres and tribal-electronic grooves. Steve Roach's musical explorations have taken him into many different realms, always touching a primal nerve and evoking brilliant mindscapes for the listener. A respected and much followed solo artist, Roach has also embarked on many collaborations in which the interplay between musicians nourishes the creative process. "Ritual Ground" is the result of one of those instrumental partnerships and stands as an important landmark in the development of tribal music. In 1993, Roach went to Europe for his first series of concerts outside the United States. While there, he met German synthesizer artist Elmar Schulte, whose own work has appeared on several different European labels…

Western Spaces is a collaborative album by the American ambient musicians Steve Roach, Kevin Braheny and Richard Burmer. This album is the first of Steve Roach’s many musical tributes to the Southwestern Desert. This recording conjures up the desert vistas and the vast stark beauty of the American southwest through a collection of pieces that play like a soundtrack to a road trip through the Mojave Desert, Death Valley and Joshua Tree, California. All of these locales were the inspiration for the musicians during the creation of the music.

Reflections in Repose captures the pure essence of Steve Roach's ever-deepening intimate embrace of silence, breath, rich harmonic inventiveness, and shifting liminal states; it's a sound and style completely unique to his electronic/ambient vision. Created over two evenings at the close of 2023, the music was recorded in the same sequenced flow as presented on the two discs’ 116 minutes. The five long-form tracks were performed on a single instrument - the Oberheim OB-X8 - the modern equivalent of the iconic Oberheim OB-8 which Steve used 40 years ago in the making of his classic piece "Structures from Silence.”

Prolific ambient innovator Steve Roach teams with Ph.D. shamanic practitioner / musician Mark Seelig to create a long-form piece of space-opening sound magic. Like the many fragrant and beautiful night-blooming plants which are host to mind-altering qualities, this 70-minute experience slowly blooms outwards with Mark’s vocal harmonic and Tuva-style overtoning intertwining within Steve’s zones and “terra” grooves. A slow motion magical blend is created in this nocturnal mist-filled realm. The power of the human voice is drawn forth in a primordial understanding and finds a perfect fusion with subterranean heartbeats, drones and zones swelling from the harmonic soil, gently urging the Nightblooming to increase its potency and allure…

After the stillness comes the Afterlight. Created in the Spring of 2009, in the afterglow of Dynamic Stillness, this long-form piece delivers the listener deep inside a multi-dimensional realm of forming clouds, an endless expanse with no boundaries or sense of temporal limits. Amorphous strands of harmonic lumina emerge and recede in a constant unfolding and reconfiguring state for the duration of this pure atmospheric suspension. This piece, along with its two companion releases Destinations Beyond and Immersion Four were created over the the same time period, and all share a common sense of breath, interconnection and pursuit of timelessness. Refined over several months, the piece was kept in constant low-volume playback during sleep, rest and times of reflection. The ongoing experience of living with the piece, and shaping it before its release into the world, has become a vital part of Steve's immersion process, going back to 1984's Structures from Silence.

It is easy to grasp the concept that Suspended Memories is one of the greatest e-music trios ever. Each member - Steve Roach, Jorge Reyes, and Suso Saiz - had a brilliant solo career before forging ahead as a trio. Earth Island, the group's second CD, explores the concept of this planet as an island in the sea called the galaxy. The composition titles make references to the dawn of man and hide isolation and desolation. The music is deep, inspirational, and distant. Roach, Reyes, and Saiz bring their own spiritualities to the table along with their own sound worlds. When they emerge, they emerge as one. This disc is an amalgamation of three distinct entities that intertwine and interact seamlessly. They do not just bring out the best in each other; they bring the totality of each other. The dark atmospheres are full of ethnic spirituality and cultural richness. There are no holes. This is a great CD from a trio of great artists.

Landmass is a surreal shape shifting grand adventure in sound, morphing through a constantly altering perspective giving witness to the creation of iconic landscape formations, stone monuments and massive alluvial desert plains, and the occasional pyroclastic flow. Recorded live on the Star's End radio show in the WXPN studios in Philadelphia with a small audience in attendanace. This adventure in sound reaches into the primal forces of nature and channels them into a work of organic evolving momentum and deeply nunanced texture. Even the most massive non-rhythmic soundforms seem to be shifting and moving from the inside out, eventually giving birth to undulating rhythmic ecstasy. A stand-out release in a style defined by Roach.

The music rises up from the darkness and howls at the moon. An ancient voice chants in serpentine ecstacy, only to subside and hover next to silence. In those moments when the sound dissolves beyond recognition, the subconscious leaks through, whispering of faded visions painted on stone, of memories suspended by the passage of time, of gods long forgotten. This is the world where Steve Roach, Jorge Reyes and Suso Saiz create their music. There are no scores, no plans, in the initial stages of composition. Like jazz artists who extemporize freely through a shared musical language, the members of Suspended Memories connect on an intuitive level of pure sound. But it isn't jazz they're playing. Roach, Reyes, and Saiz practice a form of collective improvisation from another time, another place, maybe one that never really existed before, except in the shrouded landscapes of a shaman's dream.

Emotions quietly stir and resonate in this deeply self-reflective album exploring the terrain between melodic electronic/ambient and modern minimalism. These six pieces utilize gentle melody, harmony and sonic tonality to poignantly reflect upon the passage of time, life lived, lives passed and a time of renewal: a sigh of the ages expressed in sound.
Sigh of Ages is the result of extended periods of solitude and personal reflection for acclaimed composer Roach. Resulting directly from dynamic personal and cultural events, these pieces developed over time and in the moment. After 10 months of early morning and late night sonic meditations, Roach collected these various pieces and found they portrayed a poetic theme of sonic interpretations from this experience…

Since its release in 1988, Dreamtime Return has earned its reputation as a genuine classic. The two-CD magnum opus is one of the most important, widely known and highly respected release in Steve Roach’s vast body of work. It serves as an essential benchmark within the Electronic-Ethno-Atmospheric genre.
Roach’s travels in the Australian outback, along with studies of the Aboriginal Dreamtime, and his desert walkabouts in California were the lifeblood for this recording which even today sounds like a transmission from the near future and the very distant past.
Musically Dreamtime Return richly deserves its classic status, but Roach also deserves credit for leading electronic musicians out of their sheltered studios and into an active relationship with the landscape..

Spirit Dome returns with a perfect companion, Live Archive. Living proof of the power of live performance, these recordings are so immediate and engaging it would be easy to assume they were crafted over months in the studio. Live Archive, from their 1997 tour, serves as a natural complement to 2004's Spirit Dome, recorded live to stereo master in one take in a studio-like environment. Live Archive was originally released as a small run on the Groove label in Holland, and has been out of print for several years.
Steve Roach / Vidna Obama's 2002 CD Innerzone served as the doorway to the surreal environment explored on Spirit Dome. Recorded in one continuous 74 minute session in a hotel room in Philadelphia, this is a dark sanctuary of pure texture and beautiful, if foreboding, dissonance pulled along with pulsing beats, subtle loops and dense soundworlds…