The cicadas are silent, due to cold rainy weather. I don't know if they are all gone; it's possible that when the weather heats up, the remaining horde will be activated again. But their season is mostly over. Even so, I still seem to hear the howling call of those male cicadas, which is so loud that it is said to carry as much as a mile's distance. But when I think I'm hearing a cicada, it turns out that I am actually hearing a resonance from some mechanical item like a dishwasher, or even a police siren in the distance.

The similarities of the cicadas to other sounds which carry over distance got me thinking about evolutionary adaptations. The entire idea of an insect swarm appearing only once every 17 years is amazing enough. But along the millions of years of cycles that these creatures have evolved, the most successful stud cicadas must have had those far-reaching calls, while their softer-voiced brothers did not fare so well in the reproductive market. I hear the siren sound of the calling in my memory even now, which will reach across seventeen years if evolution and fortune are on my side.

Speaking of exotic sounds, here is a review of the latest album by Steve Roach, the American master of ambient electronic music. The album, FEVER DREAMS, is available from Steve Roach's Website, which has soundclip samples.

Fever Dreams
By Steve Roach, with Patrick O'Hearn and Byron Metcalf
Projekt Records, 2004

After 2003's monumental Mystic Chords and Sacred Spaces, Steve Roach returns to the world of consciousness-altering trance rhythms with Fever Dreams. In this collaborative album, Roach is on synthesizers and weird guitar, with the pop and jazz veteran Patrick O'Hearn on bass and shamanic drummer Byron Metcalf on percussion. Byron Metcalf is familiar to Roach fans, since he worked with Steve on two exciting drum-fests, 2000's The Serpent's Lair and 2001's Not Without Risk.

Even though Roach and company have been doing shamanic trancemusic for more than 20 years, they still have something new to say. This album moves away from the evocation of Native and aboriginal cultures, into the spooky and ominous world of our modern spiritual life, where ancient religions clash in cyberspace. The first piece, "Wicked Dream," sets a mood of foreboding which continues to remind me, whenever I hear it, of voodoo-haunted New Orleans. Once again we hear the sound of Roach's exotic stone percussion and rattles, underscored by O'Hearn's bass, which now seem to imitate not the sounds of the desert but the scratching creepiness and alarms of a city deep in the wet night.

The second piece, "Fever Pulse," features some of Roach's more familiar special effects, as well as his strange guitar bending, which has been part of his repertoire for at least ten years since his work with Suso Saiz and Jorge Reyes on the "Suspended Memories" recordings. You can also hear some of Roach's newer "fractalized" electronic rhythms, echoes of his 2001 album Core. This piece is faster and brighter in mood than the first, with nice swirls of deep reverb.

The third piece, "Tantra Mantra," is the longest on the album at just under 30 minutes. It is pure trancemusic, looping its loops and plugging along at a pace just slow enough to send the listener into a hypnotic state. Don't listen to this while driving or working! This is for long evenings of astral travel, led by the drumming of Metcalf and the odd, twisting chords of Roach's guitar which pass in and out of tonality. Over the half-hour the volume slowly builds and the sounds become heavier, with interjections of electronic twertles and glorps by Roach. It fades out as it started, leaving piece number 4 to wake you up.

This fourth and last piece, "Moved Beyond," is in my opinion the best on the album. The dark vision of the first piece returns, with eerie electronic sighs and guitar wails from Roach. Soon they are joined by Metcalf's thunderous drums, whose ancient resonance backs up the sirens and dissonance of the twenty-first century. There's no pretty sun-bleached desert nostalgia here; this is music imbued with the spirit of our Age of Mechanized Terror, lit with fluorescent lights and vectored through a virtual landscape where urban shamans battle.

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