Tone Glow 180: Steve Roach
An interview with the legendary ambient musician about motocross, meditation, and tapping into a mythic imagination
Steve Roach
Steve Roach (b. 1955) is an American composer best known for his expansive ambient music. Inspired by Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, and Jon Hassell, his works find deep inspiration in the natural world around him—namely, the desert. It is through synthesizers and various traditional instruments that he constructs these pieces, all of which strive to provide a transformatively immersive space to exist inside. His initial releases, including those in the new-wave band Moebius and the solo albums Now (1982) and Traveler (1983), saw him learning from the German electronic artists he adored. He was committed, though, to forge his own musical identity—one that embodied the Californian environment he grew up in. The result was Structures From Silence (1984), an indelible masterpiece of ’80s ambient music.
He would continue to release solo albums throughout the 1980s, including his much celebrated Dreamtime Return (1988), but it was during this time that also began collaborating with more musicians. Throughout his career, he’s released records with Robert Rich, Michael Stearns, Vidna Obmana, Jorge Reyes, Suso Sáiz, and more. Roach continues to record and release music prolifically; his newest studio album is The Reverent Sky (2025), out now on Projekt Records. Steve Roach is playing two shows at this year’s Big Ears Festival and is participating in one of the fest’s panels about new-age music alongside John Diliberto and his wife Linda Kohanov. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Roach on March 9th, 2025 via Zoom to discuss cultural appropriation, being an “endorphin junkie,” and his obsession with time.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: What are some of your earliest memories of being fascinated by nature?
Steve Roach: That would be in the deserts of Southern California in San Diego County—the desert area there is called Anza-Borrego. It was nurturing and otherworldly at the same time, like you were entering into a different dimension. Even as a young kid—I was an only child—we would go camping in some magnificent place in the desert, and those were my earliest significant memories of being in a space that felt comfortable. We would be out there and it’s just that feeling of the atmosphere, the light, and the texture of everything. That sense of the expansiveness and the temperature—all of it worked together and was an eternally lasting influence.
How early in life were these first camping trips with your parents?
Probably 10 or 11. I was born in ’55 and we were in Sedona in ’62 or ’63. Sedona is now known by everybody around the world for its beauty, but at that time the beauty was there without the magnitude of people, motels, hotels, and other tourist-type activity. More of the early, primordial essence of that place was really tangible—it was right there. I was a young rock hound, always collecting pieces of the Earth, rooting around for fossils and stones—there’s a feeling of time being contained in those. All that stuff was already really compelling to me, and I was naturally tuned into it without being told about it, without reading about it. I was just drawn to it.
Were your parents also into such things? They took you camping of course, but did they specifically foster this love for nature?
They were, absolutely as you would imagine, into nature. We would do mountain trips. They were working-class parents, and for them it was about getting away from the city of San Diego and La Mesa. It really wasn’t chaotic, but it was dense with baby boomers, the landscape of endless homes—that sort of thing. It was a great place to grow up, San Diego. But still, their desire to get off the map and get out into these places… they would just be in ultra relaxation mode when they were there. We had all the essentials: the camping tent and the tables. They were just floating downstream, but just sitting under the beauty of that space, having a beer at dinner.
The influence of that deep peace and relaxation combined with nature was a really elemental influence on me from that point forward. When I was older and able to drive and be on my own, I continued those kinds of adventures. Now, my studio’s on a mountaintop in a desert in Southern Arizona. The throughline is there; there’s a huge amount of what I’m seeking for now that you can trace from that time. The core of that is: tranquility, expansiveness, solitude, deep quiet—the kind of places that your consciousness thrives in. Some people’s consciousness, anyway. I’ve certainly met people who were terrified of being in that kind of stillness.
Why do you feel that people are afraid of that stillness?
Perhaps the environment shapes all of us in the early years. I remember a Native American musician for whom I was producing an album of flute music. He was from New York City, his wife was from Puerto Rico I think, but they lived in Brooklyn. They came out to Tucson to finish some recording, and I took them out to a place outside of Tucson called the Singing Stones. It’s a very powerful, sacred space in the Native American culture. You’re out in the flat, expansive desert landscape, and out in the middle is this pile of volcanic rock that was obviously not moved there by people. There are tons and tons of rocks piled on top of each other, like a giant moved them into the spot. At the very top is a circular area that’s open—it’s a ceremonial site. A single tree was on top of that. As you climbed up, these stones would ring and make a bell-like sound. You could see that, for hundreds of years, Native American people were playing these stones. It was almost like gamelan music—you could hear their different frequencies and pitches.
So I took them out there and his wife nearly had a nervous breakdown because it was so still, so quiet, so expansive. The power of that place, contrasting with where she lives—or where she was brought up—was too much. As soon as we left there, she said she had to go back to the hotel and she stayed there for four days. So that’s one extreme example of how those environments can inspire but also create a great deal of fear. Again, it’s a realm, a place that reflects a desire to be in silence, stillness, solitude, reflection. If you are not used to that, it can be frightening, intimidating.
You mentioned that when you first learned to drive, you were doing these trips on your own. Do you remember the first trip you took after learning to drive?
I can’t say I remember that specifically, but there was another level of freedom, another level of independence, another level of not engaging with your parents. My parents were great, but at the same time they were still your parents, you know? (laughter). I’d be out there with a girlfriend or some friends, and you start to develop a relationship with your community, almost in a tribal sense. You had a certain tribe, and not everyone would want to have that kind of shared experience; you would just find the kind of friends who wanted to have one, and that was really important.
When I was able to start driving, I would be doing these trips with the music of Tangerine Dream, Yes, and Pink Floyd. I was always creating a soundtrack, and I was pretty hardcore about the order in which the music would be played. As you’re leaving the flatlands and you’re driving through the mountains, I seemed to always have a trajectory. I would build these “sets” before I ever had my hands on any instruments. I was always drawn toward mapping this journey, whether I was making the music or not. In certain cases I would be driving, and the rule was: “No talking—we’re going to listen to music.” (laughter). So now, it’s interesting to do concerts with that kind of arc in it. I’m not specifically saying “no talking,” but it’s pretty obvious, especially in the large cathedral tours that I’ve been doing, that these spaces are set up for a state of intentional listening. They have the resonance.
I saw you perform three or so years ago in New York. That was an incredible show. I remember you playing pieces from Structures From Silence (1984).
Absolutely. You were there right after COVID, at the Church of the Heavenly Rest.
How did you first get introduced to all the German synth pioneers? How did you get into bands like Yes? And what about them captivated you compared to other stuff you heard?
I was starting to explore music in the ’60s, and pretty quickly I was drawn to the psychedelic rock of the time. I found early Pink Floyd—the albums Ummagumma (1969) and Obscured By Clouds (1972)—were definitely more avant-garde than what they would become. All of that was quickly compelling to me, and Yes, of course. That style of progressive music you couldn’t miss; it was popular and available everywhere, and they were doing big concerts in sports arenas. So I was experiencing that, but there was something well beyond that I was really craving. When I heard [Yes’] Close To The Edge (1972), those first sixty seconds really lit me up, and I wanted that part to extend for an hour. It was just the sound of birds and these swirling harmonic vortexes of sound. Then boom, it would stop and it would go into the highly complex, chaotic forms that they were brilliant in creating.
I was a product of Southern California, so meditation and yoga and all that stuff was starting to emerge in the culture. I remember I went to someone’s house, folks my age, and they were just starting to have group meditations. Someone brought the album Timewind (1975) by Klaus Schulze—I was probably 17, 18 years old—and when I heard it, all the lights turned on really bright, really fast. They never got turned off, and that’s where I’m sitting right now. I still attribute it to the paradigm shift of what really set the course for me. At the time people were turning on their lights really intensely with LSD and that sort of thing, but I wasn’t really drawn to that. I was getting my really big high from motocross and offroad racing, which was born right in my town—it was brought from Europe to La Mesa, California by the importers. I got into that scene and it gave me the kind of high and intensity that I was also looking for in music. So in any case, that stuff’s going on together, and I’m hearing and seeking the most mind-expanding music, and then I heard Timewind.
In the late ’70s there was a small import record store in La Mesa, California. That’s where it all started. I was working there and, every Friday, a box of LPs would come in from Europe from the importer in Los Angeles. You’d open that box up and you’d just be pulling out one thing after another. Steve Hillage, Klaus Schulze, early Brian Eno, all the European German school, and all this stuff coming out of the UK. At that point, you’re just in it. It becomes a full takeover of your life. One thing led to another pretty quickly, and I had friends who were witnessing this fervor that I was expressing. Somehow this guy who’d just gotten back from the Navy bought a Roland synth while in Japan. He saw what was going on with me and just gave it, saying, “You need this more than I do.” (laughter).
That’s very generous of him.
Yeah, it was pivotal. That was the synth, the Roland SH-3A, which created beautiful leads. And she could do drones. So that takes you to around the ’78, ’79 period.
Why were you not drawn to LSD? I’m sure you knew many people who were interested in it.
Partly because I was very athletic. I had this focus on being physically and mentally like a samurai. I had plenty of stoner friends and the whole culture was around me. Certain aspects and certain kinds of psychedelics at that time—psilocybin, mushrooms—were coming out of the earth rather than being made somewhere by somebody that you don’t know or can’t trust. There was peace around that. But for me, it was about looking for a way to create an expanded state of consciousness that you could tap into instantly. If you meditate a lot, you get deeper and deeper into that state. Now, I say that music is my medicine. In that sense, I was already prescribing myself high doses of really intense and incredible music (laughter).
I love that. I’m curious about the role that meditation played for you. What was it like going to these places and meditating with other people?
It was very, very natural to me. It was a sense of connection. You’re completely in your own space, but you’re sharing that with a group of people your age. If I remember back, those folks that we had the small meditation group with, their parents were progressive. I don’t know if they were directly in a lineage of hippie parents, but they were not going to church every Sunday; we were hosting meditation on every Thursday night, you know? The Southern California realm that I grew up in was nutrient rich for growing your individuality.
My parents, of course, were keeping an eye on me, but they were also supportive. Most parents aren’t gonna let their son race motocross. Sure enough, one of my best friends got killed right in front of me on the track at the famous Carlsbad Raceway. My essence at that time was such: I was one of the pallbearers, I put him in the ground, then I bought his bike, and I started racing with it after we put him in his resting place. I had that kind of dedication to his memory, and also I was still in this place of, “You’re gonna live forever! Not me, I’m not gonna get taken out at the next race.”
Pretty quickly that changed when meditation kicked in, and then music became an essential part of my life—I was working at the record store, I was going to concerts all the time, and I was getting my first synthesizer. It was like an explosion of opportunities and the willfulness to step off the deep end. With my parents, that’s where the separation happened. They want you to get a good job, get married, start having kids or whatever. That whole deal of what the baby boomer arc was at the time.
How old were you when you were motocross racing? When did your friend pass?
I would say I started the night he died in ’73. I was born in ’55. You can do the math there.
Enjoying motocross makes sense with what you said about driving, about being in nature and experiencing it in this singular way. What did motocross provide for you? Why do you feel like music was its replacement? And this might not be a hierarchical thing, but a sort of categorical difference.
There’s a state of being completely immersed. It’s in any sport, but especially in a motorsport where you have to have all these skills—you have to have this focus and be completely in the present moment—because your life depends on it. I love that feeling, still do. I love that intensity, and that’s why these concerts I do have this sense of “all-in, right now.” I call that “being on the front side of now.” People say, “I want to be in the present moment,” but to me there’s another edge to being in the present, and that’s being on the front side of that. That’s what I learned early on from racing, just from the choices that I made to find and stay in that place as deeply as I can. When music really took over, that’s where I felt like I could live in that place and that it would enhance my life on every level.
There’s also a sense of expansiveness when you’re doing it, and you have this understanding of reality in your own particular way. The kind of flow state that I would arrive at in the early racing days really translated to the flow state that I got in the creative realms, especially with this kind of music that’s so visceral and sensual—I feel it in my body immensely. When you heard my concert in New York City, I wasn’t playing at a whisper-quiet volume. At times, though, we’re really in that gentle, incredibly diaphanous place. The dynamics that I present in my concerts represent the dynamics of life that I live. There’s really intense moments and then there’s moments of repose. There are moments of integration, anticipation, and then surrender and release.
Would you consider yourself an “adrenaline junkie”? I’m wondering if that’s how you would describe doing motocross, and if that’s at all how you’d describe your relationship with music.
I would say I’m an “endorphin junkie” more than an “adrenaline junkie.” Adrenaline can cause more of a reckless assimilation of the biochemical experience in yourself. But with endorphins, you’re gonna get that activated through flow states and meditation.
A lot of your early music, like with what you made in Moebius and on your solo album Traveler (1983), is indebted to those early influences you had. I’m thinking of Brian Eno and Klaus Schulze. You definitely hear this clear Berlin School influence. Can you talk to me about making these early albums and what they taught you about making music?
If you interview Steve Vai or any artist from a particular early genre they were drawn to, you’re gonna start taking tracing paper and drawing around the things that turn you on. Again, my folks were working class, so it wasn’t like you could go out and buy $4000 worth of synthesizers. I was working day jobs and scraping by, and they helped out a little bit. You might have read that I got a high-interest loan—a 25% loan—and just bought them. It would have been almost four grand at the time, which is like fifteen thousand dollars today. It was the ARP 2600, the ARP String Ensemble, the Echo Machine, the Micromoog, I just got all the tools at that point. The one guy gave me the one synth, but I needed to have all the stuff here now to start this process. Go back to that question again, I kind of got off the trail.
I was just curious about what it was like to make the early releases.
I’m certainly hearing all the German School stuff at the time, the European electronic and progressive music, to [Iannis] Xenakis and certain classical avant-garde. I just was sharing with a friend of mine that some of the early sequencer music I heard was actually by Conlon Nancarrow.
Right, with his player piano.
The player piano, fantastic. You can imagine hearing that sort of maniacal, absolutely intense music created by him. He was making cuts on a scroll and putting it in a player piano, but this was not ragtime (laughter). This was really on-the-edge type stuff. In any case, I had a Technics cassette recorder, a mixing board, and all the gear. I started recording pretty much everything on cassettes, which I still have in bankers boxes. There’s hundreds of cassettes of just woodshedding, as they say. The long story short is that I ended up moving to LA to be in the electronic scene at that time. I started playing every day, recording every day, and the ideas started getting more and more focused to the point where I had pieces where I was telling this story. I was creating a kind of map.
The first real album that speaks to me developing my own sound was Now (1982). It was on cassette originally and was put onto CD many years later because of its archival value. Digital everywhere now, of course. That was clearly rooted in the sequencer style, but then you could also hear “The Ritual Continues,” which had a tribal thing going on. I was already aware of the music of Jon Hassell at the time. In terms of my influences, he’s side-by-side with Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream. Those, I would say, are the triad.
Which Hassell are we talking about? Are we talking about the Fourth World albums? Or Aka / Darbari / Java: Magic Realism (1983)?
Everything that Jon did but all the way back to Earthquake Island (1978), right? So if you know that, you’re in the long run with all of his music (laughter). You hear it now and you realize he was doing the harmonizer, that kind of processed trumpet, back in the ’70s. And I got to know Jon later on, which was amazing. While doing Now and the second album Traveler, I was really conscious of not doing side-long pieces, which was what was coming out of Europe. These were 20-minute pieces. Even Timewind was 30 minutes on each side of an LP—there’s not a lot of bass there so they were able to squeeze those on there. In any case, those two albums clearly had the influences of my inspiration and my roots. Then I was very conscious about not wanting to walk in those footsteps for very long; I wanted to move into a realm that represented me being who I am, which is a product of Southern California. I wanted this environmental aspect as opposed to the heavy postwar politics of Germany, which shaped so much of the work there.
I’m curious if you could talk about your solo albums from the ’80s. It was with these that you really created your own robust musical identity. There are your famous albums, Structures From Silence and Dreamtime Return (1988), but there are the Quiet Music (1986) albums too. I’m curious what you recognized was needed to capture your Southern California upbringing. Were there specific things you were doing with these synthesizers that made you feel right at home but also different from your forebears?
That’s a great question. It wasn’t a paradigm shift moment or an “a-ha” moment, but I was very conscious that I was learning the techniques through my own process. I tried to take an electronic music class at a local college. I lasted about two hours and left (laughter).
Which college was it?
It was Grossmont College, a junior college. They had an electronic music course and they’re playing Morton Subotnick. I’m sitting there thinking, “I’m gonna be dead before I get to do anything,” so I just cut to the chase and walked out (laughter). The piece that I kept praying for was this breathing, diaphanous sound that I could draw out. I wanted to put my hands on some kind of instrument and bring out that kind of atmosphere, tranquility, and timelessness—a sense of forever. When the Oberheim OB-X was released in ’82, I was living in LA and I had friends that worked at Oberheim. The circles I was in were getting really expansive, just with the way everything happened when you were in a scene. And the way I was able to move to LA was through this magazine. It was the first electronic music magazine in America, it was called Synapse.
I was reading through issues of that earlier this week. There’s some scans of it online.
Man you’ve really done your homework there. That’s fantastic. I wrote an article about Klaus Schulze, I don’t know if you read that.
I did, yeah.
So those guys, the editor and so forth, are the ones who helped me come to LA. They had gone to CalArts and studied with Subotnick and Harold Budd, and CalArts is where the Serge synthesizer was born. I was already getting into the deep end with these highly intelligent folks who were immersed in the academic world, but I was the opposite of that. I wouldn’t say that I was not intelligent, but I was very young—full of absolute self-driven desire to learn—and I could see early on, even when I went to that electronic class for a few hours, that I wasn’t gonna fit in here with the way I operate. That’s why I had to get the gear. I had been playing these chordal progressions on the ARP String Ensemble that had these emotional waves and space; that was the precursor to getting my hands on the Oberheim, which was one of the early polyphonic analog synths.
There was a very willful desire to avoid doing imitative versions of German electronic music. It was really clear to me that it was a great portal to learn and woodshed and get on my way to the “10,000 hours” place. When I got the Oberheim, I was coming home to something that was so eternally alive in me and waiting. You have those first two, Now and Traveler, and Structures From Silence was the third album after that. That was all within the course of about two years. But Structures was not recorded as an album; I created the pieces and they sat there for a while and I just enjoyed them. It wasn’t like, “I’m gonna create Structures From Silence and put it out next week so it can be a part of this emerging New Age scene.” And that was something that I was on the outside of in a lot of ways despite being born in that culture.
Structures was created in such a spontaneous way, a way where all this energy emerged. We’re celebrating it 40 years later, playing it in cathedrals (laughs in disbelief). I’m grateful and humbled by that. Whenever I play it I’m right back in that time but also completely present with it. It’s so emotional and so powerful to play this piece that, minimal as it is, has this diaphanous quality where it’s always different and changing, almost at a cellular level. It’s about the space between the notes, the quality of the space I’m in, and the audience that’s holding the space with me. Soon after Structures, Quiet Music came spontaneously out of that. I tapped into a spring and it was flowing out of me. It was not out of some versions of the European stuff that we’ve been talking about.
Some artists may be reticent to perform a decades-old album that they feel they’ve “evolved beyond.” What has it been like to revisit and perform one of your first solo albums? Are there certain things you’ve learned about the pieces that you didn’t recognize back then, that you’ve only come to recognize after performing them again on this cathedral tour?
The piece itself [“Structures From Silence”] has been so recognized around the world for what it does when you hear it. That’s something I quickly became aware of, in terms of how it was reaching people, how people were responding to it. I’m always absolutely taken aback and grateful for that. It’s like a gift that came through me; it is a culmination of the ways that I perceive time and space. There’s the tonality and the technical aspects but also the emotional import that came through to create what that piece is. I don’t think I played it live for 15 years—I wanted to hold it in that place. I started to play it occasionally, in shorter segments, within the last 20 years. And as time moved on and appreciation for it expanded, I wanted to celebrate it for myself, as part of my story, my history.
The concert you saw in the Church of the Heavenly Rest, I think I played it early on in the set. I played an invocation, a short prayer, and then went into Structures. Now that it’s in the set, I’ve been playing it for a much longer duration. What I’ve really learned, or appreciate about it now, is its absolute minimal form. Every time I play it now it invites me, inspires me. I’m fully present, and the way I’m phrasing the main motif is endlessly changing and interacting with time and space in a subtle and sacred way. It’s never about my changing of the structure because there’s a beautiful symmetry that has to be honored. The way that I’m able to expand the space between the notes and the chords is getting more and more profound.
I think one of the last concerts I played last year, perhaps it was in Denver or with the Age of Reflections group, who are going to be the artists in residence for all the visuals and the presentation of our concert during the Big Ears Festival. In playing in their concert series with the 40th anniversary of Structures, I would get to this point where the space between the chords and motifs would just become wider and wider and wider, to where it was—in my head—a thousand people in silence for twenty seconds. And that’s a long time in a big space like that. The ability to expand time out like that is really where I’m going with it at this point.
You mentioned your interview with Klaus for Synapse earlier, and one of the things I remember in that piece is that he said his works remain up to the listeners’ interpretation. That’s the reason, he thinks, why people may love or hate his music. Do you want that to be true for your own work?
Yeah, I can’t make sure that anything happens with it, whether it’s Structures From Silence or The Desert Winds of Change (2024) or Arc of Passion (2008), which is really sequencer driven. I went away from that music for a while, but now I’m at a level with it where I’m so in love with that form and the way I’m evolving it. In terms of concerts, I just want to create these journeys into the mythic imagination. You’re getting activated in these primordial states, the blessed moment. There are places in the set that are more confronting, more challenging, more intense. You’re entering through the dark night of the soul for a while, and we work through that. Then there’s resolution and integration after that. In that sense, I’m feeling all those emotions over the course of two hours.
What drew you to playing the didgeridoo? You traveled to Australia, you had that album with David Hudson and Sarah Hopkins, Australia: Sounds of the Earth (1990). Can you talk about exploring these traditional instruments and merging them with synthesizers? Does that relate to how you provide a “journey”?
There is this desire to connect with the sound of the Earth, the sound of creation, its primal core. You can call it a yearning, you can call it a romantic thought. I first heard the didgeridoo in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977) and this was in the early or mid-80s. To me it sounded like one of the first synthesizers because of the effect its sound had on consciousness. It was sustained and primordial; it felt electronic, like the perfect instrument to blend with an Oberheim or some kind of dronescape. When I traveled to Australia, the Dreamtime Return project was emerging and I met up with David Hudson. I learned to play didge from him.
What happens when you have this area of music that’s created electronically—music that’s created without any atmosphere in it, with no air—is that the minute you open up a microphone and put it in the studio with a didgeridoo, clicking sticks, seed pods, and these kind of things, it’s like you’re taking the visual sound-field from watching something on your phone to being in a massive IMAX theater. When you’re putting them in a relationship with these expansive soundscapes, it activates your imagination, your senses. You’re not tethered to being told, like with a movie, “You’re seeing this now.” Your imagination is at work: “What is this sound?”
That’s what’s cool about electronic music. I can create all these different sounds with the synths and even though you’re hearing them, you don’t have a sense of what’s creating that sound. At a certain point, your imagination can try to ground it, but what’s really happening is the sound is triggering these primordial, ancestral memories—a sense of place or some other time. When I met up with Jorge Reyes is when it became really interesting. He knew my music well, and I knew his music from a distance, and we started combining his pre-Hispanic instruments—the clay water pots and ocarinas—and he was playing didgeridoo, and I was too. That was probably the most expansive exchange, culturally, of instruments and ideas that happened.
I wanted to ask about collaboration. You started out in the band Moebius, and then you had a bunch of solo albums before collaborating with a lot of people. There’s Jorge and David, but also Robert Rich, Vidna Obmana, Michael Stearns, Kevin Braheny. What do you feel like you specifically learned from Jorge beyond just the introduction of these instruments? Why did it feel like “the most expansive cultural exchange”?
With Jorge in particular, we felt like brothers in a sense. There was this instinctual impulse to express and to take things beyond the present state of consciousness again. So we were inspiring each other, and the exchange of learning from each other was really big. He was working with acoustic instruments, having that primordial connection to them, and I was having that same kind of relationship with the electronic instruments I was using. We really created a bridge between those worlds, especially if you hear Vine ~ Bark & Spore (2000) or the work as Suspended Memories on Forgotten Gods (1993). That’s where we were mutually inspiring each other to step out of our zones. I wouldn’t say “comfort zones,” but more like the morphing of all of our styles came together in a way that felt organic.
So much of my music in all of this was born from playing live, capturing incredible peak experiences in recognizing the power that the music held. When Suso [Sáiz], Jorge, and I were touring Spain, we did some concerts there and came back into the studio. We were in a studio in Germany after the festival, then we went to Madrid. The elements we had were all being born the week before from playing live. I think what I really learned from Jorge was that sense of going for it, that kind of abandonment and a full emotional surrender to the flow of creativity in the moment. Vidna Obmana was absolutely another artist who was a total “sound soul brother.” The things that we did together, the connection that we would have playing live was just extraordinary—the way we would intuitively key off of each other at exactly the right point.
Would you mind talking about Well of Souls (1995) and what it was like working with Vidna on that?
I don’t have a great memory of it. I know that was in the early stages of our working together. I had met Vidna—Dirk is his Belgian name, Dirk Serries—and I was doing concerts in Europe through the first part of the ’90s. He wrote to me through Projekt Records before I went to Europe, so we were in touch. We met and, all of a sudden, you don’t have to explain anything, you just do it. Those are the collaborations that go beyond collaborating. You bring something together, and just by listening to it and not talking about it too much, you continue to put yourself out into that space. A lot of our work, like with Jorge, was really forged in the live experience with an audience. That sort of thing would be terrifying for some people to go out with a blank slate, and we would just thrive on that. A blank slate means you still have grooves programmed in, you have these different options, a roadmap. The influences that we were immersed in would’ve been David Sylvian, Jon Hassell, some of the Eno stuff, but more in the Fourth World realm.
In a previous interview you said that you are drawn to instruments that give you the most direct response and feel in your fingertips, body, and soul. Are there instruments that you feel don’t do this for you?
Anything that’s being driven out of a computer. Soft synths where the computer becomes the interface between you and the sound itself. You could have a didgeridoo that you’re playing on a keyboard that’s being generated out of an engine on a MacBook Pro, and while that doesn’t mean it won’t be effective or visceral, there is something missing there—the cellular connection. It’s different from these E-mu samplers that are from 20 years ago that I still use. Those have the feeling of an instrument, for me. Those have something different from a computer. Part of it is psychological—it could be the interface, the feel of it. You may have a sampler that has 35 years of your sounds inside of it, and the interface is all designed to do a very specific thing. Over the years, you develop a relationship with it; I can go to my E-mu E4XT in the live room and turn it on, and I can pull sounds out of it that feel like I’m ripping a hole in the sky and all of this stuff is pouring in. It’s also just the feel of the instrument too, the knobs or different aspects just have a tactile feeling that’s similar to how instruments feel.
With my setup, I’m flying around hardware gear, and that’s the part I’m supported by in these tours with Age of Reflections; it’s not a guy showing up with one modular in a backpack and you’re putting it in the overhead when you fly out. Vidna would play the fujara, which is a Slovakian overtone flute, and in the last two years I really wanted to bring that kind of next-level breath, emotion, and fury out of my body in the way I mentioned in that great quote you had. So I’ve integrated the fujara, which is a six-foot flute that I play through the overtone series, and it’s amplified and put into processing and reverb. I’m loving the energy that comes out of me and that instrument when I’m placing it inside of the set. It was the next great piece to bring into the acoustic collection of didgeridoos and pre-Hispanic instruments that I learned from Jorge and other places. The combination of those instruments and the texture that they have through a microphone, when you open a microphone up—even in a sterile electronic piece—and you just play a half-speed harmonica or something… it’s going to bring something really emotional. It’s like in painting: you’re creating depth and dimension, you have different tactile feelings of different sounds. Some are really smooth, others are coarse and grainy. That’s what I love, these different sonic textures together.
Why have you chosen concerts as a method of delivering your music instead of, for example, installations? If someone wanted to stay in a gallery for an entire afternoon, they could do that in such a space. I’m curious why that isn’t something you’ve explored more in your life compared to just doing two-hour concerts.
The energy I hold in my sense of creating has a ceremonial quality to it. We set up an immersive space and you have sound-worlds ebbing and flowing… I’ve done that sort of thing and I love doing that, but there’s a whole other level of engagement when you come into the concert and you’re there and I’m there—I’m playing to you, Joshua. I’m playing and interacting and I’m having this relationship with the sound and the energy of the space, with the audience. It’s totally unique to that moment in time. So there’s something about that—it drives me to want to keep doing this. To set up in a room and have it run for a couple of weeks would be cool, but my nervous system and my engagement with sound is drawn to creating and experiencing in [real time]. In a sense, the churches are the perfect space for that because they’re a purpose-built, intentional place to go into that create a spiritual moment in time, whether you’re religious or not.
It could be in these cathedrals, or it could be like when I did an artist-in-residence at a jazz club in Tucson for a year. On the first Tuesday of the month, we would have that space in this small club. It was equally as powerful as being in a big cathedral. The space would get really still, and they were all there to experience it together. Entering into those places for me is like a tabula rasa. I enter with this kind of clean slate, but there’s the entire momentum of my life, all the things I’ve seen and all the places I’ve been—all of it gets boiled down into this really intense and beautifully inspiring, calm, relaxed state from which all emerges over the next two hours.
Are there specific traditional ceremonies that you’ve been a part of that have shaped the way you’ve thought about how to approach concerts?
I can’t say there’s any one specific stand-out ceremony or some kind of… what would it be? There’s no organized sense of connecting into a specific ritual that I perform before I play, for example. My wife could probably speak to you about that—she’s a very articulate author, and you’ll meet her at the concert of course. We’ll be doing this presentation with John Diliberto on Friday morning with Echoes, the radio show. Linda [Kohanov] was quite a prolific writer before she moved into writing about equine-facilitated work.
You said you were getting more into David Sylvian, Jon Hassell, all of the “fourth world” music. I’m curious what this music did for you that the older music that you were into—the German electronic music and prog rock—didn’t do.
Jon influenced so many people, including David Sylvian, and the feeling I get from Jon’s music is the feeling I have in my music, which is that of “suspended memories,” where we keep coming back to this elemental “essentialism.” What’s in the music is so essential—it’s really efficient in terms of the elements present, and they’re carefully chosen and constructed. There can be a lot of improvisation, but the elements you are working with are specifically working together to create some kind of shift. That’s the big piece I would say I’m getting as I’m evolving out of the German School. Again, I’m tapping into my place on the planet, the environmental realm that I grew up in. It’s like how traditional, Indigenous music would be born out of nature, would be born out of sounds that the different cultures are hearing. They’re creating didgeridoos, different types of flutes, drums, and clicking sticks. All these different things are coming from the environment, but also expressing aspects of the environment and their particular beliefs, this foundation of their being.
Were you at all invested in the politics that surrounded Indigenous rights? Australia: Sound of the Earth came after the country started more outrightly reckoning with their racist history. Were these things ever animating ideas you had?
The travesties in Australia with Aboriginal culture, that’s a whole other world. I was very aware of that, but I was also aware at the time that what I was creating was not about entering into a political stance. I shifted back into a time before the Western world came into their world. To me, the Dreamtime Return piece was about going before all of that. So spending time at those sites—these places where Westerners had almost never been to—was etched deep into my soul. Along with meeting certain Aboriginal folks there, I felt like I could tap into a time shift that was before the Western world arrived, and “Looking for Safety” speaks to that. It was about tapping into a mythic imagination, about traveling in the essence of the Dreamtime.
I feel like your desire to tap into this pre-colonial era is a political statement in and of itself, right? Or would you disagree with that?
I’d say it’s an aesthetic statement, one born of my desire to travel back in time before any Westerners were on the continent. I was spiritually infused with my time there. The expression naturally emerged from a rarefied experience to immerse in the remote sites that were still resonating with Aboriginal presence. There’s nothing political about this—I just want to go into that realm and learn about the Rainbow Serpent, learn about the culture at that level. My motivations came from deep respect and was about honoring the culture.
I did the album Kiva (1995) with Michael Stearns and Ron Sunsinger, and that was an especially touchy subject because of the Native American piece—they’re so often co-opted in so many ways. That album had more people within the Native American culture coming forward and speaking out about it. Ron Sunsinger is an Anglo but he was adopted by a Native American family—he lived with them and was given his name by his Native American grandfather, and he was part of the Native American church. To me, that was the part that I felt comfortable with. He had been through the blood, sweat, and tears. He had been through the Ghost Dance. He had done the ayahuasca and peyote ceremonies with them. It was through our working with Ron that my feeling was, and is, that we were doing something authentic and respectful. He had the complete blessings of the tribal elders to use the chants and ceremonies woven in. This was the same with Dreamtime Return. The few sources I used were allowed with the blessing of Percy Trezise, who was an explorer and Aboriginal ally. His blood brother was an Aboriginal elder who passed several years before I was there in the late ’80s. After Percy spent time with me and sensed my intentions, I was blessed with those sources.
How do you navigate the tension of making music when you know it might be perceived as cultural appropriation? Given that you are using traditional instruments here and there, I’m wondering how you’ve navigated that throughout your career, or if you’ve avoided thinking about it.
I’ve certainly not avoided thinking about it, but I never felt a tension around it. If you look at when Dreamtime was released, that was the peak of “world music” and Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records. Indian music had already blown up after the Beatles introduced Ravi Shankar. My music that includes “world elements” is coming out of the world that I’ve created out of respect and acknowledgment over all these years. Also, I’m not taking traditional rhythms or aspects within different cultures and just learning how to play them to put in my music. I’m taking a didgeridoo or a clay flute—these instruments that can be used in any kind of wide range of expression—and they’re like synthesizers that existed a thousand years ago, and I’m using them in that context.
Solo Native American flute music is world that I wouldn’t want to bring in. It’s so instantly all contained in itself. I can take a Native American flute, play something completely non-traditional, transpose it down two octaves, soak it in reverb, and have it become another textural source for a sound world that creates some kind of emotional response fully unrelated to the original source. Add to all this almost 15 years of working with Jorge. The exchanges and sonic evolutions we mapped together are etched in my soul and remain a core primal expression I work with now. I know my Dreamtime Return was a big inspiration to him in the other direction.
The world is still influencing itself on so many levels now, and that’s the beauty of it. Indigenous artist and cultures worldwide are taking synths, drum machines, the myriad of world instruments and electronic tools and mashing up their own new sound world experience—it’s all connected. David Hudson is an Aboriginal musician. I produced several didgeridoo albums for him and, as I said earlier, I learned to play the didge from him. We became friends and he was later married at my house in Tucson. He would end up taking didgeridoos made in Tucson from agave cactus stocks—more great exchanges. Besides being a traditional Aboriginal dancer and didgeridoo player, his thing was Australian country and western. So there’s all this that blending from the West as well.
This all makes me wonder how it feels for your music to be labeled as “New Age.”
Early on, it was always this phrase that you did not want to be associated with. I was at some of the early steering committees in Los Angeles. I remember being in a meeting in Topanga with different artists, including this writer Lee Underwood. Do you know him?
Yeah, I know Lee Underwood.
Fantastic man, that’s amazing that you got all of that. I knew Lee really well, he was the guitarist for Tim Buckley. And Linda, my wife, was doing the contemporary instrumental column in Tower Records Magazine, and that was changed from the New Age column because of what we were talking about. She did that column—Lee had passed it on to her, and then she passed it on to John Diliberto. That’s part of why we’re having that panel, which will be cool. People were calling it New Age and it stuck. It stuck in a way where a lot of people started to feel it was too narrow a box, but we were stuck with it, and I ended up with two Grammy nominations in the New Age category. At a certain point, you just realize that the energy around it faded. It diffused, but it was always like… you had to say it and then make a statement around it. “I’m really not a New Age musician, but that’s where they put my music.”
It’s funny that you mention Lee Underwood because I know you produced California Sigh (1988). What was it like working on that?
In the daytime I would be working on Dreamtime Return, then Lee would come over and we would record his guitar work in my studio. He’s a highly intelligent, emotional, complex human being—an amazing guy. I remember him being in Tim Buckley’s band, and at that time he was really feeding into all that history with him. He would be driving around Venice, around West LA. He would stir up all these emotions of being back in that time with Tim, and then we would record those tracks. He was really going down into the emotional rabbit hole. I love holding the space for that kind of thing. I’m very tuned into that and supportive.
I did want to ask about your wife Linda. She ends up on some of your records. She wrote the liner notes for Western Spaces (1987), but then she’s also a vocalist on “Cloud of Unknowing” from The Magnificent Void (1996) and “Heart of the Tempest” from On This Planet (1997). What’s it like to work with her given your relationship?
It’s just miraculously amazing because it keeps unfolding. When I first met her, she was deep into all of this music, she was writing, she was a music director at a public radio station in Florida. I was on tour promoting the Dreamtime Return album. I flew from New York City to Pensacola. She picked me up, and it was just one of those stories where all the lights go on. It was complex at that time because of the fact that we were married to other people, but everything took its course. Our mutual dream was to move to the desert, get a cool desert house, and do what we love to do together. And this is what we’re doing 35 years later. While she’s played viola and written now on the newest album, One Day of Forever (2024), she also played the whole second side of Back To Life (2012). In any case, she’s a violist, she was a first-chair violist, she played in an orchestra for 12 years, she sight reads Bach instantly, she’s got all that history. She has a carbon fiber 5-string, all the effects, loopers, ’verbs. She played at Grace Cathedral with me last year and she’s playing at one of the shows at Big Ears with me. You know, she introduced me to Scriabin’s mystic chord.
Amazing.
That’s what the album Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces (2003) emerged from.
It was funny to hear you talk about motocross and driving because that same sort of immersion feels similar to what it might be like riding a horse, and I’m sure you two connected in that way as well.
Yeah, and the horse piece came after we moved to Tucson. In her work it’s about the energetic field that horses create and the way that humans can learn about emotional states. We have many horses at our ranch, but it’s all groundwork. You learn about how you interface nonverbally, and she works with big corporations and teaches them leadership skills and also about PTSD scenarios. She’s written five really influential books on that, so that’s a whole other world. She’s on fire. My Timehouse is twenty-something miles away from the ranch house. Every room is a universe of gear, you know? There’s a didgeridoo over here, and the studio we’re sitting in, there’s the analog cave. The ranch house, all her work goes on there, we’ve had a studio there for years too, every night she’s playing 3-4 hours a night, viola at the end of the day.
I know that she met William Shatner at some point.
Yes, her work led her to meet Elizabeth Shatner at a conference in Chicago for PTSD soldiers, exploring equine work to help with that. When Linda said, “I’m married to a composer, Steve Roach,” Elizabeth’s assistant just went white—she’s a hardcore fan of my stuff, I guess. Elizabeth really enjoyed Linda’s books, so she gave Bill one of Linda’s second books, and he fell in love. On his 85th birthday, she called us up and asked if we wanted to fly over and do a day session with William as a birthday present. That’s a whole other story in itself, man. Here’s another human being who is so full of life and passion. We talked about everything—including motocross! Did you hear that album that he did, Ponder the Mystery (2013)? Edgar Froese is on it.
Whoa, no. I haven’t heard that. I’ll make sure to check it out. Is there anything that we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to mention?
That’s a great question man, let me just ponder the mystery on that for a minute (laughter). I really connect to sound and music… it’s like breathing, or getting nourishment from food. I have to experience it every day for many hours. I’m really conscious of time management, and I’m obsessed with time. The Timehouse, the Timeroom, the Timeroom Editions, the titles of my albums—Dreamtime. The most valuable piece in your life is time. How do you respect that? Do you spend it, do you waste it, do you immerse in it? All of those aspects—the clichés and metaphors of time—are all at play now. The connection to this passion of being alive is in this dimension we call time. I’m connecting with it in a way that is forever nourishing and inspiring. Thanks for your time. I was honored by your interview and depth of knowledge.
There’s one quick question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing that you love about yourself?
My ability to be alone.
Why is that the quality that you love?
When you’re really happy to be alone, you can find a real joy in being with the people you love and appreciate. To be an artist at the place where I live, you have to be absolutely protective of your time and your space—you have to crave being alone. Linda’s the same way as a writer and musician. My Timehouse is fairly remote—30 miles away from the main house. I need time to just move though all the creative phases, and at any time of the day, night, or into bird thirty or 6am, you’re waiting or willing that moment to happen—and then you’re there in it and recording. At this point, I am in my forever place. I’m just appreciating the absolute gift of being alone and connecting with people, of bringing my work from solitude into a live setting.
Information about Steve Roach’s life and music can be found at his website. A large number of his albums, including the newly released The Reverent Sky, can be found at his Bandcamp. Roach will play two shows at this year’s Big Ears Festival, and you can find information about these shows here. He will also take part in a panel discussion with John Diliberto and his wife Linda Kohanov. More information about that can be found here.
Thank you for reading the 180th issue of Tone Glow. It’s about time.
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Legend, thank you!
Great interview. Thank you!