Steve Roach
World's Edge

The high-tech music of Steve Roach has something primordial at its core: the dazzling light of a thunderbolt, as seen on the cover of the double album "World's Edge", or the reference to drives and animistic spirituality in some of the titles present here ("Beat of Desire", "When Souls Roam").

Certainly, this work, released in 1992, presents two antithetical yet representative aspects of Roach's style: miniature and fresco, microcosm and macrocosm intertwining in an embrace at the edge of the world.

The first disc contains ten tracks with a total duration of 66 minutes. Roach's atmospheric keyboards blend with looping percussive phrases, tabla (played for the occasion by Guy Thouin in the track "The Call"), metallic tinkling ("Steel and Bone"), and the aboriginal sounds of the didgeridoo ("Thunderground"). All tracks emerge slowly from the darkness and silence, gradually gaining shape and depth, then fading into the cosmic void from which they were evoked.

The only point to note about this first part of "World's Edge" is the lament for the narrowness of forms, as Steve Roach's music needs expansive stretches and should not be confined within the oppressive constraint of a few minutes' duration.

To this end, the second disc comes to the rescue, containing a single track lasting 58 minutes. "To The Threshold of Silence", this is the title of the lengthy piece, offers the listener the chance to immerse themselves in a vast soundscape whose boundaries are not visible. Once again, Roach's keyboards (joined by Robert Rich's steel guitar) pour waves of sound into the environment, traversed by hissing streaks and dotted with occasional bright sparks. After twenty minutes, there is a pause filled with cosmic roars nearly reaching absolute silence, then amid echoes and reverberations, a soft drum loop and the reprise of the phrase already presented at the opening emerge, all for another twenty minutes until the piece moves towards a slow conclusion.

Overall, a satisfying work, this "World's Edge": music from which nothing should be asked but that asks us, instead, for surrender and surrenderliness. Music that despite its extreme serenity can create tension, both for the emotional resistance the listener experiences regarding the sudden conclusions in the tracks of the first part, and for the anticipation of an event or an evolution in the expansive sonic continent of the second.