“Enigmatic or simply subliminal this Immersion series continues its musical quest to seek peace and existential tranquility”
CD 1 First Light 73:31
CD 2 Sleep Chamber 73:14
CD 3 Still 73:37
(DDL 220:12) (V.F.)
(Dark Ambient music)
Here is the new, maybe the last one, chapter of the slow and floating immersion of senses. This time Steve Roach strikes hard and offers nothing less than a huge 3 CD boxset, totalizing more than 4 hours of a submarine music where the movement is completely flooded by groundwater which flow into dark earthly subsoil. Of course, that Steve Roach is repeating itself. After all, how to reinvent the ambient kind album after album while maintaining a newest interest? Steve Roach succeeds in it by bringing subtle variations in tones and color to his music. And IMMERSION: THREE is different because it’s music of ambiance, for those who want to think and meditate in a very hermetic environment. A claustrophobic milieu where elements of the air meet those of water.
First Light is a slow rise of senses that is hanging to a halieutic meditation. An underwater dream where fishes seem to be the answer to our aphonia. Listening to this at high volume and the feeling of immersion can’t be more than real and it’s the reassuring side of Roach's works who seems to always reach his goals. On the other hand, we are in an atonal world where only senses can hope to communicate with these low variations of movements. Without really frighten waves, waters' debit is quieting down with its progress to embrace a more ethereal phase. And this soft thought on inertia continues with Sleep Chamber where everything seems to be in conformity with its naming; long moving synth layers which swim in a cerebral cortex in order to bring us towards a medieval sleep in as much as the sword is not too much shaken. Recovering the monotonous heaviness of First Light, Still always represents the non-place and the non sequenced oscillation to offer a long spiritual litany which seeks its inspiration.
Enigmatic, experimental or simply subliminal Steve Roach's Immersion series continues its musical quest to seek peace and existential tranquility. This 3 CD boxset is a long musical exercise which may look at first sight a bit heavy, but it is about a work which transcends the kind to bring us there where only Roach can bring us: in the immensity of empty spaces and the harmony of the closed ones.
Sylvain Lupari (June 29th, 2008) ***½**
Available at Projekt Music Bandcamp
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