Steve Roach
The Magnificent Void

THE REVIEW

If Nothingness has fascinated humanity for millennia, if nihilism is a philosophical current that knows no crisis, then one could hail "The Magnificent Void" by Steve Roach as one of the most interesting musical incarnations on the theme.

And yet, this album, though highly successful, seems to be an inverted manifesto of the theme it intends to illustrate: sounds full rather than Void, the saturation of the sound space rather than Nothingness.

Let us explain better: "The Magnificent Void", released in 1996 (and inspired by the work of psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, whose quote appears on the back cover), presents itself as a long, uninterrupted track (69 minutes) of magmatic ambient/electronic music. There is an internal articulation over the arc of the composition, so much so that the CD is divided into eight tracks each with its own title.

Nor is there a lack of (relative) variety, so that the different episodes constituting the work are characterized by their own physiognomy and acquire their own character during listening: some are clear examples of pure electronic sound, in other moments Roach tarnishes the clear sonic surface with a rusty metallic tinkling.

But it is the impressive acoustic presence of this unrelenting wall of sound, the extremely stretched times and sounds, that make this album a challenge to our perceptual habits: not a moment of respite, not a spark of light in this gloomy universe. And when, nearly 50 minutes after the music begins, you realize that the last track of the disc remains to be tackled (the final "Altus", 20 minutes), the music undergoes a sudden acceleration and growth in density, so that the album's finale subjects the listener to a genuine tour de force in which there is a concrete impression of engaging in a fight against the sound that comes at you without respite, forced to oppose one's resistance as human beings not to be finally overwhelmed and annihilated.

In the dialectic between the Void of the initial thesis (the album's title) and the fullness of its musical outcomes, we witness the slow unfolding of the serpentine coils of "The Magnificent Void": the magnificent disc.