Price: £13.98 inc. VAT (£11.90 ex. VAT)
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Release Date: 26-10-98
Label: Celestial Harmonies
Catalog Number: 17070-2
Barcode: 13711707021
Musical Style: Therapeutic
Over the past ten years, Steve Roach, Kevin Braheny and Michael Stearns have established themselves as conceptual innovators and major solo recording artists. These three synthesists collaborated for the first time on an album entitled Desert Solitaire. The Southwest desert is inviting and intoxicatingly beautiful,' said Roach, 'but it is also dangerous and frightening. We wanted to capture the desert's timeless beauty and we also wanted to create in sound the more visceral emotional experience of actually being there. The music contains some lovely desert imagery, but it also contains some of the desert's ominous, potentially lethal undertones. We were inspired by our personal experiences in the desert, by Edward Abbey's book, Desert Solitaire and by Abbey's introduction to the Desert Images book, with photographs by David Muench. For us, this album is as much a tribute to Edward Abbey as it is to the desert itself.' Roach, Braheny and Stearns each play two solo compositions on Desert Solitaire. Roach and Stearns team up on three pieces, with Roach and Braheny working together on the title track.'
| 1 | Flatlands | 04:49 |
| 2 | Labyrinth | 06:56 |
| 3 | Specter | 09:34 |
| 4 | Canyon's Embrace | 03:35 |
| 5 | Cloud of Promise | 06:38 |
| 6 | Knowledge & Dust | 03:23 |
| 7 | Shiprock | 04:00 |
| 8 | Highnoon | 10:30 |
| 9 | Empty Time | 05:51 |
| 10 | From the Heart of Darkness | 03:50 |
| 11 | Desert Solitaire | 06:06 |
Steve Roach is recognized worldwide as one of the leading innovators in contemporary electronic music. His range of musical expression runs the gamut from the introspective soundscapes of Structures from Silence and Quiet Music (Complete Edition) to the explosive sequencer music of Empetus. Roach masterfully combined these two aspects of his style on the double album Dreamtime Return , considered by many critics to be a landmark in the new music genre.
Kevin Braheny studied composition at Vandercooke College of Music in Chicago, then moved to Los Angeles in the mid 1970's, where he began doing soundtrack work. Shortly afterwards, he started working with Malcolm Cecil (one-half of the legendary pioneer Moog duo, Tonto). He continued to hone his woodwind and keyboard skills while working as a sound engineer and in 1980 he self-released his first solo album Lullaby for the Hearts of Space. He was the first signing on the nascent Hearts of Space label in 1984 with The Way Home. Later HOS solo releases include Galaxies (1988) and Secret Rooms (1990). His skills as an audio engineer are especially apparent on the latter, which contains striking binaural 3-D sound effects on the passages linking musical pieces.
Braheny is as adept at crafting instruments as he is at creating gorgeous melodies, having built many of the instruments used on his four Hearts of Space solo releases. This includes the Mighty Serge modular analog synthesizer, fashioned from a design by Serge Tcherepnin and assembled in 1977 and his trademark Steiner EWI, which he built from the original design by Nyle Steiner.
A pioneer of the spacemusic boom of the 1970s, Michael Stearns has continued at he vanguard of sonic invention through a dozen solo albums and more than 20 years of wide-ranging studio work and film scoring. Trained on classical guitar while growing up in Tucson, Arizona, Stearns explored rock and jazz in his teens and twenties. He created and played his first electronic music while studying at the University of the Pacific.
In 1972, he moved to Los Angeles as a composer and sound designer and evolved into what Audion Magazine called the most consistently interesting and intriguing American synthesist. In 1984 Stearns founded M'Ocean, a recording studio in Santa Monica specially equipped for surround sound and electronic music. Over the next decade he designed multi-channel surround soundtracks for IMAX/OMNIMAX space theater films and for Universal Studio's Earthquake and Back to the Future theme park rides in Los Angeles and Orlando. He also collaborated with Maurice Jarre on the feature film Dreamscape and with director Ron Fricke on the acclaimed Chronos, Sacred Site and Baraka. His fascination with the ecology, culture and rituals for the American southwest resulted in the 1994 Hearts of Space collaboration with RON SUNSINGER, Singing Stones (HS11042). In recent years, Stearns has increasingly incorporated into his music sounds and inspirations gleaned from extensive travels in Indonesia, Thailand, Egypt, Costa Rica, Brazil, the Galapagos and now Venezuela.
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