Duel of the Bountiful Solo Ambient Gods: Steve Roach vs. Robert Rich

he's more like Forrest Fang or Klaus Schulze, tends to have a lot more going on in terms of melody, etc.

Sounds really nice. Even more stuff to explore, thanks!

xp

good jumping-off points for exploring the genre: compilations "The Promises of Silence" on Projekt, and "Twilight Earth" on Timebase (there's two of the latter)

honorable mention for my mans Erik Wøllo

Yeah he's put out plenty of solid work as well as Forrest, who I had the pleasure of interviewing a couple of years back as well.

I’m not really into space music but I love a few peaceful Steve Roach tracks like “Quiet Friend”. Vidna Obmana is someone I really want to devote more time too, heard some stuff recently that seemed right up my alley. I’m always looking for stuff like Discreet Music. Always been kind scared of Robert Rich, seems so dark.

His best work draws upon a darker palette, yes, but much of it is serenely positive too. Offering to the Morning Fog, which came out earlier this year, is more becalming than not.

I’ll check it out

the division between peaceful / dark approaches in this music is pretty interesting

I always took it that Roach made precisely three kinds of records -- sequencer/Berlin, peaceful/healing and then the darker isolationist strains, and that the breakthrough examples of each were 'Empetus', 'Structures From Silence' or 'Quiet Music', and then 'Magnificent Void'. But this thread got me back to his website where he defines his three styles as sequencer-driven Space Music, floating time-extension ambience, and... tribal-ambient (electro-acoustic hybrid, cue flutes & percussion >> 'Dreamtime Return')

Whereas I always grouped his second and third strains by mood & affect, the second being all his tranquil stuff like 'Structures' or 'Dreamtime' whether or not it was all electronic or helping itself to acoustic ritual traditions, and the third being the 'breakthrough' he made when he annexed the previous 15 years of ambient industrial and started sounding less like Hearts of Space and more like Zoviet-France / MB / Lustmord / everything on Projekt

Hearts of Space started the Fathom sublabel for Rich & Roach at that point to put out the darker stuff -- Fathom put out 'Stalker' and 'Void', and then Roach sensibly moved to Projekt and began his 3-8 albums a year schedule in earnest. Maybe it's because of the very distinct label branding I grouped his strains accordingly

https://www.colpapress.com/products/music-from-the-hearts-of-space-guide-anna-turner-stephen-hill

^^ this is a pretty amazing comprehensive overview circa 1981 of everything Hill & Turner were drawing on for the 70s HoS shows. striking for including a lot of folk records which included space-adjacent tracks, a listing of the most space adagio movements of modern classical (key to understanding the curation for the soundtrack of Sagan's Cosmos). and also for his inclusion of cassettes & unreleased tapes locals had sent him, a few of which have gotten reissued like Joanna Brouk or Ariel Karma but it is kind of crazy to see a historical document like this helping to will a genre into existence

Bump.

Thanks for this thread - I never listened to much by Robert Rich or Jorge Reyes, and I'm starting to get into both. Reyes I only knew from his Mort Aux Vaches album (which is great), I've been listening to The Flayed God a bunch this week and it's awesome too.

Ultimately this is just Mozart vs. Beethoven redux (Beethoven is the correct answer, obv).

I've been spending the past week listening to both, and I think I'm leaning towards Rich... really love Fissures with Alio Die, Yearning with Lisa Moskow, and the recent Offerings to the Morning Fog.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Almost forgot to vote…

It's still Rich for me but I'm currently listening to the last track off of Inanna's Dream – a Roach/Serena Gabriel collab that came out this year – and thinking that either outcome would be equally perfect.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Only 15 votes? Tsk, tsk, ILMers clearly need more ambient beatitude in their lives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FR0thRsgMY