Always reaching toward the ineffable, ambient-electronic pioneer Steve Roach’s Sentient Being evokes a state of intimate, resonant awareness — a place where feeling, knowing, presence, compassion and empathy converge. This work is not about the philosophical term “sentient being” but rather the lived experience of perceiving from one’s own inner field of consciousness.
The six pieces emerge from a surrender to an inherent pure flow; the music inhabits a lucid zone of both reverie and present-moment depth and expression of the grace of being human: feeling, sensing, reflecting into the subtle contours of awareness. The embrace of these soundworlds arises from a finely sculpted sonic palette shaped by decades of devotion to exploring various states of consciousness through the power of sound unified with deep emotion and intention.
Sentient Being manifests a contemplative landscape of sumptuous and immersive realms that embody the core of Roach’s creative life: the passion to translate a fully present state of being and perception into music. In this album, by a master of the audible arts, the ineffable becomes tangible, inviting the listener into their own inner place of connection, wonder, renewal and reflection… in suspension.
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REVIEW BY PETER THELEN - EXPOSE:
Sentient: Endowed with feeling and unstructured consciousness. That’s a good start for describing this latest release by Steve Roach — a little bit of a lot of things: sequenced electronics, sweeping melodic beauty, panoramic brilliance, dreamy ambience, and curious sonic scintillations and sparkle. Six long tracks of Roach’s trademark sound, buoyant and celestial, mystifying yet familiar, this is the one I’ve been waiting for, one that awakens a listener’s deepest inner spiritual circuits, with each of the album’s six tracks fading to black long before losing its welcome. Let’s start in the middle of this 70-minute sandwich with “Rapt in Solitude,” a piece that comes in slowly like the fog, each chord revealing an energized yet simple beauty, stark and riveting, shining a seemingly endless light into the great expanse of darkness, overlapping and crossing paths, with few moments of silence. Then comes the title track, swirling with introspective brilliance for close to twenty long minutes, with the power to cut through the mysterious haze that encircles the listener, flowing and ebbing with majestic beauty and warmth, constantly morphing and rolling as it recreates itself; few pieces of music hold this kind of mesmerizing shimmer fused with such organic depth. While those two probably have the deepest impact, there is plenty more here to match their glory, like the set opener “Angels in Flight,” where bristling sequences reach deep beyond the horizon, blended with scaling colors and shadows while deep pulses reflect the magical power of the universe, while its follow-on “I Feel You” is highlighted by repeating clusters of tones that morph slightly with each occurrence, perhaps bits of piano with heavy studio treatments, but I would prefer to not even try to analyze how they were made, instead accepting the sounds at face value. After the title track, “Angels at Rest” seems to recap some of the earlier sonic experiences, while “This Place of Splendor” wraps up the album nicely with a long series of warm overlapping chord changes and myriad sparkle and sonic curiosities.
