Steve Roach - Dreamtime Return

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Free Music Notes for Dreamtime Return

Free Music Review: Revisiting an extraordinary masterpiece
Hit: 5 Stars

By the mid-1980s, Steve Roach had successfully digested the bones of European electronic music; equal measures of Klaus Schulze, Vangelis, and to some extent Tangerine Dream. Towards the end of 1987, Roach was invited by Floridian photographer David Stahl to accompany him to Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, Australia to assist in the filming of Art of the Dreamtime, a documentary which was produced for PBS. The experience, which for Roach was a culmination of a childhood dream, was to alter both the course of his life as well as his music.

Dreamtime Return was the great turning point of Roach's career, a line of demarcation separating the Berlin school-inspired electronic music he created since 1979 from a new primal, tribal-percussion based music rooted in his first experiences in the Australian Outback. The employment of electronic textures and structures can still be heard loud and clear, but it was now more organically-rooted and the emphasis on sampling becomes evident for the first time. Roach's influences at the time encapsulated everything from the piano-based soundscapes of Harold Budd to the Eastern/North African-influenced trumpet compositions of Jon Hassell, the latter being a former pupil of the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Throughout the 14 highly original compositions on this album, Roach brilliantly brings into focus what the ancient "Dreamtime" period in Australian Aboriginal prehistory may have been like, based both on Aboriginal legend as well as the latest geological data. From approximately 176,000 to roughly 20,000 years ago, the aborigines of Australia lived in a so-called "Garden of Eden" filled with Ice Age mammals and temperate rainforests and grasslands. There were a series of severe droughts occuring from roughly 30,000 to 20,000 years ago which resulted in widespread devestation throughout the continent and a resulting decline in the quality of Aboriginal life in general.

The opening track "Towards the Dream" is a powerful sequencer-based piece that easily rivals the best efforts of Froese and Schulze. The following track "The Continent" is an ambitious and rock-solid expression of ardor--one can imagine flying high above the surface of the Earth observing the extraordinary landscapes of the Outback, but this may have been Roach's attempt to express what he felt when he got off the plane in Queensland and took his first glimpse of Australia.

From these "daytime" pieces, Roach quickly moves into darker, deeper territory, from the aggressive("Songline") to the wistful ("The Other Side") to the somber("Truth In Passing"). The first disc concludes with one of the greatest compositions of his career: the near-melodic waltz "Australian Dawn: The Quiet Earth Cries Inside", six minutes of utter genius. Never has there been a single piece of music outside of classical music which seems to epitomize the entire breadth of human emotion as in this one composition. The carefully-choosen synthesizer chords which arch and undulate here seem to express the decline of an ancient culture more perfectly than anything that Roach has created since, as well as a yearning for its return, hence recalling the album's title.

The second disc opens with the 30-minute "Looking For Safety", a sublime meditation on the peak of the Dreamtime. Here Roach interpolates DAT recordings of bizzare bird calls echoing off of canyon walls with a complex melody emphasizing hope over despair. "Through a Strong Eye" is the most experimental work from the album, with rich, convoluted synth textures cascading among one another in a dance of primal awe. "The Ancient Day", a piece co-composed with Robert Rich, prominently features the dumbeck alongside Roach's ebb and flow of broadstroke synth colors, sequing to "Red Twilight with the Old Ones", which incorporates authentic recordings of aboriginal songmen by Percy Trezise. Perhaps the most sparse composition, "Red Twilight" recreates the eerie glow of a nighttime ceremony designed to conjure up Dreamtime ancestors and spirits. "The Return" provides a reaffirming conclusion to this monumental recording, with a resounding final chord that tests the limits of your sound system.

There are those who've described Steve Roach as the Bach of electronic music. This recording more than any other he's made would provide the best proof to this claim.

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