TAPE-RECORDINGS: NOW (EXTENDED) | VINYL RECORD (LP)

Limited edition of 200. Composer and multi-instrumentalist Steve Roach (born in 1955 in California) is a longstanding leader in contemporary electronic music, drawing on the beauty and power of the earth's landscapes to create lush, meditative soundscapes influential on the emergence of ambient and trance. At the age of 20, inspired by the music of Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Vangelis, he taught himself to play synthesizer. After being a member of Doug Lynner's Moebius in the late '70s and early '80s, he began recording as a solo artist in 1982, and self-released his classic album Now that year, with distribution by Eurock. One year later Roach released another classic recording on Domino Records called Traveler. As with Don Slepian, Roach then signed to Fortuna Records and released several LPs and tapes. With Structures from Silence (1984) his music began taking enormous strides; the album's expansive and mysterious atmosphere was inspired directly by the natural beauty of the southwestern U.S. With subsequent works, including 1986's three-volume Quiet Music series, Roach honed his approach, developing his dense, swirling textures and hypnotic rhythms akin to environmental sound sculptures. In 1988, inspired by Peter Weir's 1977 film The Last Wave, Roach journeyed to the Australian outback and gathered field recordings of aboriginal life for what would become his widely acknowledged masterpiece, the double album Dreamtime Return (1988). A year later, he teamed up with percussionist Michael Shrieve and guitarist David Torn for The Leaving Time, an experiment in ambient jazz. After relocating to the desert outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, Roach established his own recording studio, Timeroom, and in the years to follow grew increasingly prolific, creating both as a solo artist and in tandem with artists including Robert Rich, Michael Stearns, Jorge Reyes, and Kevin Braheny -- in all, close to two dozen major works in the 1990s alone, all of them located at different points on the space-time continuum separating modern technology and primitive music. Since 2000 his enormous creative output, live concerts, and sonic innovations remain at a high level. This LP includes all the tracks from the legendary debut tape Now, plus the previously unreleased "Emotion Revealed."