Steve Roach and Robert Rich - Strata

A critical and commercial success, the Steve Roach and Robert Rich album spent several months on the Billboard New Age charts.

With Strata, Steve Roach asked Robert Rich embark on an exploration of "the subconscious, the surreal..Sounds which evoke a reverie... personal, collective, and universal," a music "half forgotten, buried within the strata of the primordial mind." Whether the final product achieves its virtually shamanistic goals will have to be decided by each listener, but it's clear that Strata pushes resolutely deeper into the new territories opened up for contemporary psychonauts by electronic sound production.

From its early polyrhythmic movement pieces, through the darkly compelling interior landscapes at its center, to the healing sonorities that enshroud the concluding "La Luna," Strata conveys the listener to soundworlds below the surface of ordinary music.

Experienced listeners will hear evidence of influences from artists like Brian Eno and Jon Hassell, North African and other world music traditions, but the mixture and ultimately the meaning of the musical sound experiences which Strata unlocks is unique. Remarkably, it advances on a sonic frontier without resorting to an alien musical language.

Tracklist

Credits

Steve Roach: analog and digital synthesizers,
sequencers, samplers, glurp
Robert Rich: synthesizers and sampler,
percussion, steel guitar bamboo flutes, tape
hiss, glurp

Produced by Robert Rich and Steve Roach
All music composed, performed, and recorded
by Steve Roach and Robert Rich. ©® 1990,
Soundquest Music/BMI & Robert Rich/BMI

Thanks to David Hudson for didjeridu sample
food, Micky at Grandma's Music, Tom Perot,
Stephen and Leyla, Ethan Edgecombe and
Fortuna Records, Linda Kohanov, and Dixie Chan

Recorded 1989-90 at The Timeroom, Tucson, Arizona,
and Soundscape Studios, Mountain View, California,
Mixed to DAT at The Timeroom.
Digital mastering: Stephen Hill and Robert Rich at
Hearts of Space Studio, San Francisco, on Thiel CS 3.5
monitors. Digital editing and assembly: Bob Olhsson
with Sound Designer Il. 

2-HOS-11019