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Steve Roach — Midnight Moon
(Projekt 99, 2000, CD)

by Mike McLatchey, Published 2000-10-01

Midnight Moon Cover art

Steve Roach has never hesitated in risk-taking, stepping off the beaten path and putting it all on the line, but this new release is easily his biggest risk to date. While Roach has gained much acclaim for his mastery of synthesizers and various indiginea, one wonders what the response will be to his experiments on what is (was?) an unfamiliar instrument. Midnight Moon is a personal reflection that sheds a different light on an impressive back catalog. Rather than using his lengthy experience working with synthesizers, Roach works with guitar here, and it sounds quite a bit different than what one would expect from most of his other music, the closest equivalents being his deep ambient albums. All the usual nuances of Steve Roach's “sound” are conspicuously absent here. The music is bleak, foggy, and filled with the impressions of a limbo-like state. The guitar sounds waver on an indeterminable abyss, and just when the silence becomes deafening, clusters of notes drift in from nowhere. While many of Roach's albums are suffused with bliss, Midnight Moon reverberates with a cosmic angst, one that is often too close for comfort. But it is in this way that Roach's guitar tabula rasa speaks the loudest. Because the most important comparison isn't between Roach and the handful of other ambient guitarists that a surface-level comparison might suggest, but to his own work as a whole, the reflection speaks volumes.

Filed under: New releases, Issue 20, 2000 releases

Related artist(s): Steve Roach

More info
http://steveroach.bandcamp.com/album/midnight-moon

 

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