Customer Reviews

Dust to Dust

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Steve Roach is best known for his guttural, stirring, sometimes creepy sonic atmosphere music. Employing a host of aboriginal drones, hums, moans, and other earthy sounds, his work has won high acclaim across the New Age and electronic music spectrum. On "Dust to Dust", a co-project with Tucson denizen Roger King, Roach takes a decidedly different turn. It's impossible to accurately describe this wonderful album. King's twanging guitar and mournful harmonica are straight out of a spaghetti western, while Roach's patented atmospherics reach for the high plains and big skies of the west. Having been born in Utah and traveled all over the western United States, I found this album to be gorgeously evocative of the places I have been to and the things I have seen. I'm not sure if I have ever heard another album that so eloquently captures the grand desolation of the west. I have taken this album with me on many a driving trip and it is perfect music for traveling across eastern Washington, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, and elsewhere.

"Dust to Dust" by Steve Roach and Roger King is an unexpected yet melodic and soothing blend of ambience and guitars with a noticeable western flair. The cover matches the theme of the album perfectly, with its black-and-white shot of cacti in what appears to be Arizona. "What drives a man to go west?" the back queries the listener, to the reply of, "The soundtrack of lingering ghosts, to the lost and not-so-forgotten dreams of restless souls who were driven to "Go West, by God!" The back cover shot is eerie, yet highly intriguing, and adds to the attractiveness.

Track 1, "Gone West," starts out very slowly and gradually builds both volume and intensity, and tapers off nicely into "A Daze Wage," a syncopated tune with the D-string twanging so much that it practically draws you right to the desert. "A Bigger Sky" and "The Ribbon Rails of Promise" on tracks 3 and 4 definitely show roaches trademark wavelike synthesis that hooks on the relaxing abilities of your brain, which is exactly what I was hoping to pan out from this album. Again, Roach's music never fails to chill me out and prepare me for reading, writing or meditating, or even sleeping--but not at all in the boring sense. Beer bottles, the washboard, various guitars and bass make this an excellent reverie. "First Sunrise" on track 5 is a wonderful blend of reverberating guitars among a floating, ambient background, which melds into track 6, "Lost and Forgotten"--a dark and pleasantly scary movement, suspenseful and transcendent. "Snake Eyes," "Rain and Creosote" and "Ghost Train" finish out the album through a thunderstorm--powerful, yet perfectly controlled--you almost feel that you are teleported to the Southwest, harmonicas permeating the foreground with waves of floating synthesis.

Basically, anything Steve Roach is worth having, since I prefer ambient and electronic music. I do not demand absolute perfection and cutting edge originality. Although this is not my favorite album, I would not be without it. It has a nice variety of new sounds absent on the 1987 release, "Western Spaces." Both yield indispensable ambience for soothing your mind at an exceptional price. Highly recommended.

 

 

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Steve Roach and Roger King- Dust to Dust (Projekt 79)

Steve Roach meets Ennio Morricone. Well, maybe not as extreme. This for Roach is not a great departure from his previous ideas, just a slight deviation off the path that he has trodden for so many years. Whereas before Roach has looked out into the stratosphere and universe for inspiration and in the process found our souls, this time he is quite content to check out the ghosts in his own backyard. For this recording he has teamed up with fellow Tucsonian Roger King, who in the past has engineered for Steve. Somewhere along the line both realised they had similar musical ideas which required further exploration. Thus was borne Dust to Dust.. Welcome to the worlds of Ry Cooder guitar circa Paris Texas, wash boards, harmonica, coyotes and thunder storms, lightning...all mixed in with the signature sound that Roach has defined for himself over the years. Slow motion electronic ambiences, spatially enhanced to give them depth and dimension. Roach of course is better known for his didgeridoo playing but he's no stranger by the sounds of things to the harmonica. In the right hands and mouth of course, it too can exude emotion and incredible feelings. We're not talking Toots Thielsman here by the way, more so snatches of sound which recall early Clint Eastwood films as he drifted across the plains doing what he did best. Images of ghost towns, tumble weed, dust, bar doors hanging by their hinges swinging in the breeze. this music conjures up this sort of imagery. Roach has of course embraced the desert for many years now and over the years his work has embraced more and more native ethnic instrumentation. Think of the grounding effect a group like Suspended Memories had, as opposed to listening to the Quiet series, which were in themselves based on the movements of sand. One gets this tremendous feeling of space when you listen to this recording. Credit goes to both for creating an alternate ambience of sorts. There is nothing profoundly new here, it's just that Roach does it so much better than most.

Imagine a soundtrack for the old West, not the John Wayne and Clint Eastwood cowboy west but the hard workin', lone desert where men and women worked hard in the hot sun. This is the mood that sets in as the listener follows the guitar twangs, harmonica slides and eerie ambient chords as the pieces carry the listener along the trail. It clearly combines the work of a skilled sound designer like Steve Roach who creates the wonderful ambient atmosphere and Roger King who stimulates the listener with the guitar slides and twangs. It's smooth, it's rough, its strange and it brings back what once was the lonely plains of the West.

I was completely suprised at how great this album really is. Originally a collaboration between Roger King and New Age Meistro Steve Roach, "Dust To Dust" is a haunting tribute to the ghosts of those who aimed to strike it rich in the Wild West in the mid 19th century. The mix of Roaches haunting New Age sound with King's Tucson twangy guitars is something to listen to. Words can't do this album justice. Buy it today!

Few CDs compel me to listen over and over, but this is one of them. From the opening track, "Gone West," to the windswept terrain of "Rain and Creosote," I find my mood and my mind transported into that mythical place where the American West dwells. This is music to listen to, music to read to, or write or draw or sleep to. It will infect your spirit, and haunt you, and draw your imagination to high desert plains, to mesas in the distance, to dry river beds, to juniper. You won't want to come back.

Dust, gold seeking, frontier poker, saloon, mines, Western space and isolation. Yeah. I lived out West. This took me back there. Listen for the grating of metal against rock.

Once listened to you wish you were in the Wild West. I played this while reading one of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy Books - The Crossing. The combination of the music and the prose places you there ... you are travelling the rugged west with the hero in the book.

Steve Roach has definitely done more adventurous work. But here he tackles a definite genre - fake western movie music. This genre may or may not have been invented by Duane Eddy & Link Wray; in any case, many others have tried their hands at it including Ikue Mori, Scenic, & Neil Young, "Dust to Dust" stands as evocative late nite music, drone that entertains but rarely disturbs, perhaps better heard unexpectedly on the radio than on one's own CD. The ambient sounds (rain & thunder) are either fitting or corny, depending on your mood. I've heard music much like this on PBS documentaries - "The Farmer's Wife" comes to mind. No new musical trails are broken. But there's room for all in The Great American Desert & time will tell if this Roach / King collaboration survives there.

Ever find yourself mesmerized by the soundtrack of an old western show? Well, maybe this cd is a little more sophistocated than that, but if you're expecting gorgeous ambient soundscapes as is on "Desert Solitaire", it's not to be found. This is really raw and gritty. I was unimpressed. I have played it only a couple of times since purchasing it.