Exposé Online banner

Exposé Online

Not just outside the box, but denying the existence of boxes.
Covering music from the fringes since 1993.

Reviews

Steve Roach — Portals and Spirals
(Otherside OS-V, 2025, CD / LP)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-09-23

Portals and Spirals Cover art

I knew it was only a matter of time before the ambient master Steve Roach released something on the OtherSide label; if you weren’t paying attention, that’s the label that released albums by Craig Padilla (The Pulse of Life) and Xan Alexander (Ouroboros II) late last year in beautiful DVD size die cut packages with swirling colored almost-psychedelic artwork in what was a perfect match for the music on the CD inside. Now Roach has his first release on the label with similar six-panel die cut packaging and a beautiful illustration, mastered by none other than Robert Rich, again in a limited edition of 500. The album features only two tracks, the thirty minute opener “The Far Place” that finds Roach in a heavily sequenced pulsating dream that regularly shifts between deep bass tones and more metallic sounds from the upper sonic strata, further blessed with interesting percussive tones and floating blissful solar winds that captivate the imagination. Of late Roach has more often worked in the pure floating ambient realm, but this certainly isn’t  that, being more edgy, gripping and perhaps somewhat mechanical sound that comes with sequencers, but retaining the shimmering beauty and floating aspects just behind the foreground. The title track, at forty-three minutes, closes the album, and while it also features some brisk sequences along its trajectory, it does tend to be more layered and floating than the opening salvo, with beautiful sheets of color and textural shimmer going well beyond the six-minute mark before any sequences are heard emerging out of the primordial soup, but when they do come out the feeling is a bit more ominous and foreboding than what we have on the opener. Given a few more minutes, the tremulous textures and powerful sheets of melodic color return to share the same space, propelling the piece to its conclusion. This time, t he liner notes include exactly what hardware and tools Roach used to create this spellbinding collection.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Steve Roach

More info
http://othersideaudio.bandcamp.com/album/portals-and-spirals

 

What's new

These are the most recent changes made to artists, releases, and articles.