Electronic Music, Writing, and Reviews

"Vir Unis"'s real name is John Strate-Hootman, and he's based in Chicago. As with all ambient musicians, he makes his music available through his Website.You have heard his name before in collaboration with Steve Roach, but "Unis" has never really been a part of the "school of Steve Roach." His style is heavily dependent on synthesizers and the use of fractals and other mathematical patterning to produce a gleaming and powerful sound. If Roach is the voice of the vast open desert, and Rich the glurp of algae ponds and echoes of Islamic archways, then Vir Unis is the electric buzz of Midwestern powerplants, or the photon song of high-energy particles streaming from distant galaxies.

Vir Unis (which is fractured Latin for "one man") is a newer artist than Roach or Rich. During the 80s he was a drummer for experimental rock bands, but by the 90s he had moved into almost exclusively electronic music. He worked with Steve Roach in 1999 on the spectacular BODY ELECTRIC and later on BLOOD MACHINE. Unis' first major solo album was THE DRIFT INSIDE (1999), which as its title conveys, is a trancey passage of floating ambient with some percussion accents. In 2000, Unis released AEONIAN GLOW, which I regard not only as one of his best albums, but up there with the other greats I've mentioned as an ambient masterpiece. AEONIAN GLOW, composed all electronically (with many altered sample sounds) takes its inspiration from the ancient religious philosophy of Gnosticism as well as from science fiction and modern physics. With my own spectrum of interests, I couldn't ask for anything more! It's made of all sustained notes, with no rhythm. It features dissonant and chilling microtonal harmonies, accented by "Gothic" tone-clusters, icy water sounds, electronic special effects, and near-subliminal samples of half-heard, altered radio broadcasts, with occasional somber bell sounds. One track is called "Particle Path," perhaps evoking the power of the particle beams at the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago. The most powerful track on AEONIAN, though, is the central piece titled "A Night of Passage," thirteen minutes of some of the most dramatic, mind-altering ambient ever composed. This is not for the faint-hearted!

In the years after AEONIAN GLOW, Unis has moved into a much more rhythm-oriented type of music, collaborating with fellow synthesist James Johnson in the PERIMETER series, whose track titles are taken from mathematics: "Cartesian Plane," "Singular Integral," "Geometry of Recursion," "Intersecting Planes." There are also references to Kabbalah and Western esotericism, in titles like "Mapping the Four Worlds," and "Spherical Archetypes." The music on these albums, as well as on Unis' own MERCURY AND PLASTIC (2002), tends towards the mechanical, chugging along in industrial rhythms with electric hums, sparks, crackles, buzzes, and roars reminiscent of Chicago's elevated transit system. Melodic elements are sustained by a droning, somewhat distorted electric guitar sound, that gives these pieces a hard edge more related to rock than ambient.

Vir Unis returned to the non-rhythmic, sustained ambient style he worked with in his earlier albums, with his short album, EVERYTHING SEEKS BALANCE (2004). Releases in the last five years have included works in both a quiet, ethereal style such as RETURN OF THE LOCUST QUEEN, NOT EVEN THE RAIN, and HENRY HUD. The last two, "Rain" and "Henry," were composed in honor of his young son Henry, who was born in 2005 and is his father's pride and joy. The little guy is already picking up and trying to play guitars and other musical instruments. Other Vir Unis creations are less gentle, and are more in the realm of edgy beats and electronica, such as 2012 and TOKYO HIGHWAY, which were done in collaboration with his fellow artist "Elf Machine," and THE BOOK OF MUTATIONS. These feature the intricate "fractal" computer-generated beats which were also used in Vir Unis' collaborations with Steve Roach.

In the last few years, he has also been busy with his own record label and production company, AtmoWorks. AtmoWorks represents not only Unis' music but that of many other composers in different styles of ambient and electronic music. There are over twenty-five different artists to choose from in the Atmo catalogue, so ambient fans of all tastes should find at least something to like there. AtmoWorks also has a "music stream" on its website which offers an ongoing sampling of various artists' music. And just recently, Vir Unis started an AtmoWorks internet radio program, "Rabbit Hole Radio," late Thursday nights on the Stillstream.com ambient channel, in which Unis plays a mix of pieces, sometimes playing two or three simultaneously and adding in sounds of his own, so that each program is actually a unique Unis "concert DJ" performance. In this way, this creator of very esoteric music is not only helping his own cause, but putting himself directly into the effort to keep this music available and encourage the creativity and freedom of those who make it.

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Vidna Obmana is the pseudonym of the Belgian ambient master, Dirk Serries. Vidna Obmana, as is stated on his website, means "optical illusion" in Serbo-Croatian, and like Vir Unis pseudonym, allows him to make polymorphous music without his own personal identity getting in the way. Vidna Obmana has been working in the electronic and experimental music field for more than twenty-five years.

Of the ambient composers I've profiled so far, Vidna Obmana, in my opinion, is the darkest and most obscure. His harmonies are almost all dissonant, his characteristic intervals being minor seconds, minor ninths, and other edgy tonal choices. His "signature sound" is, like true ambient, slow, drifting, slowly cycling in long loops, contemplative, quiet, and often deeply melancholy. I tend to think that Vidna Obmana is so grim because he is not an American, and does not partake of the innocence, or the naivete, of any American composer. Hearing his music is like gazing at the grey, misty skyscape of Belgium, a land of near-perpetual rain and fog. When he finds a major chord, it is like a rare ray of sunlight over the Low Country landscape. This style is best heard in albums like THE SURREAL SANCTUARY (2000) and its companion album THE CONTEMPORARY NOCTURNE (also 2000). But these are only recent examples of a musical personality which has been in development for over 20 years.

Obmana is, like Robert Rich, a multi-instrumentalist. He plays not only synthesizers, but electric guitars, percussion, and varieties of a strange Eastern European flute called the fujara which provides not just one note, but a note and its overtones at the same time. It sounds more Southeast Asian than European. Obmana does mostly ambient drift, but he is capable of some compelling and complex electronic rhythms, as in his album CROSSING THE TRAIL (1998). Yet he depends more on harmony and chords to get his meaning across, rather than the special effects and trancing rhythms of other ambient composers.

Ambient music, the offspring of globalized technology, is an international field, and Vidna Obmana, like Steve Roach, has collaborated with other ambient composers from all over the world. It was Steve Roach who really put Vidna Obmana on the ambient map in America, with their ongoing series of collaborative albums. The Roach/Obmana duo released their first set, the 2-CD WELL OF SOULS, in 1995. This big long album contains some very scary, "out there" music, as well as lots of wall-shaking rhythms. They tightened up their structure in the single-CD album CAVERN OF SIRENS (1997), in my opinion the best of their collaborations. Full of unusual percussion and rhythms, this sonically fascinating album uses samples of many different voices, including a Tibetan monk chanting prayers, sirenlike female voices, gravel-voiced growls, and weird singing. Steve Roach himself provides the ecstatic vocals in the glorious, headlong motion of track 4, "The Current Below." Roach would re-work some of the ideas from this particular piece into his LIGHT FANTASTIC two years later. In 1998 they produced a sprawling 3-CD set called ASCENSION OF SHADOWS: Meditations for the Millennium. Their fourth album, INNERZONE (2002), returns to the land of creepiness, with underworld flute playing by Obmana. They released their fifth major collaboration, a record of a live concert called SPIRIT DOME, in 2004.

Obmana continues to be very active in Europe, not only in ambient music but in film, live concerts with other instrumentalists: jazz, rock, pipe organ, and even classical chamber groups. He has also done music for theater, opera, films, art installations, and even an aquarium (SOUNDTRACK FOR THE AQUARIUM, 2001). His voice is not as easy to appreciate as some of the other composers I've mentioned; his European gloom and Belgian surrealism go against our American fondness for clarity, energy, speed, and light. But Vidna Obmana's music is a rewarding experience for those who can appreciate a subtle world of grey tones and slowly shifting clouds.

An update from 2009: Last year Dirk Serries decided to close his "Vidna Obmana" line of work, in order to concentrate on other music and theater projects. He re-organized the Vidna Obmana website and it now has a comprehensive discography of everything he has done under the Obmana name. You can see from this discography that he has produced an amazing amount of work as "Obmana" so the legacy of this endeavor is a major achievement and influence in the world of ambient music.

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In this chapter we move from the sun-bleached desert of Arizona to the moist underground of fungi, the hypnotic-fragrant Near East, esoteric underground labyrinths, and turbulent weather.

Robert Rich, based in the San Francisco area, started out as a psychology student at Stanford University, but by the early 80s had switched over to experimental electronic and acoustic music. Robert Rich's Web site provides a comprehensive guide to his sonic universe. Rich continued his interest in psychological states by holding "sleep concerts," all-night events where the audience was invited to bring their sleeping bags to the concert hall and slumber through the night while Rich spun dream-music on his array of instruments. Some of this was recorded and was released in the late 90s on Rich's album INNER LANDSCAPES (1999). In 2001, Rich produced the audio DVD, SOMNIUM, which lasts 7 hours if played in its entirety, in an attempt to provide a "sleep concert" for any listener who wished to try it at home. All the albums I mention, as long as they are in print, are available from Rich's website.

Musically, Robert Rich has developed a highly individual sound, both as a multi-instrumentalist and a composer. An important component of this is his use of "just intonation," a pre-modern form of tuning in which all the notes and chords seem (to our ears, used to Western tuning) to be out of tune in a most eerie way. This mood of strangeness is enhanced by Rich's choice of instrumentation. One of his signature instruments is the steel guitar, familiar to country music, which he uses in an infinite-sustain, reverbed way to stretch and bend notes out into endless lengths. You will hear this weird wailing guitar winding its way through most of Rich's work; he also uses electric guitar (often played by guest instrumentalists, as much of his work is ensemble work) in a similar way. Rich makes great use of percussion, which he plays himself, as well as flutes, exotic stringed instruments, and violins. And of course there are Rich's electronic synthesizers, tuned to "just intonation" and providing backgrounds and harmonies ranging from the ethereal to the eldritch. He refers to his more watery synthesizer sounds as "glurp," an amphibian word he adopted when no other description quite defined the froggy plop he wanted to convey.

From his earliest musical days, Rich has been fascinated by Middle Eastern culture, not only its music with its quarter-tones and syncopated rhythms, but by Islamic philosophy and pattern-geometry. Many of his albums, such as his 1988/1991 GEOMETRY and his 1998 SEVEN VEILS, are directly inspired by this aural mysticism. Another main interest and theme of Rich's imagination is that of hidden or underground biology, especially that of bacteria, moss, and fungi. Like the avant-garde composer John Cage, Rich is a mycologist, or mushroom expert. Rich's musical interests also extend to the music of Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and you can hear the sound of the Indonesian gamelan in albums such as his fabulous 1989 album, RAINFOREST. In his 1991 GAUDI, which in my opinion is his best album so far, he unites the themes of sacred geometry, Islamic/Iberian mysticism, and microtonal harmonies in a gorgeous and yet understated synthesis.

Rich has collaborated with some of the very best in ambient music, both instrumentalists (such as the Chinese-American violinist Forrest Fang, to be profiled in a later chapter) and other electronic composers. In 1990 he worked with Steve Roach to produce STRATA, and in 1992, they returned with SOMA, which I regard as one of the greatest ambient albums of all time. Rich played his ghostly guitar on Roach's long piece "To the Threshold of Silence," the second CD of his 1992 WORLD'S EDGE album (described in the previous chapter). After that, however, they went in quite different directions. Rich has also produced albums of art-rock, under the artist title "Amoeba." He has continued to follow his path into musical images of water, darkness, microbiology, and dreams, with some very dark and terrifying passages like his three-CD live concert set, HUMIDITY (2000). His current work continues his explorations into non-Western tuning, Eastern instruments, and bizarre biology.

2009 update: In the years since this article was written, Robert Rich has continued in the paths he created in the last decade. He has released more recordings of live concerts, such as the brilliant CALLING DOWN THE SKY (recorded in Colorado in 2006) and has collaborated with British ambient maker Ian Boddy in three albums. Rich also collaborated with filmmaker Daniel Colvin (using computer animation) in a seriously esoteric exploration called ATLAS DEI, released in 2007.

But my favorite newer (last five years) work of Robert Rich are two albums that aren't quite in his "main line" of work: 2004's OPEN WINDOW, a solo piano album, and 2005's ECHO OF SMALL THINGS, which is a mix of "found sounds" and very quiet electronics. OPEN WINDOW is a recording of the kind of piano improvisation Rich would do before he got into the main sequence of a concert. A mixture of Scriabin, Debussy, and ECM-style ultracool jazz, this wonderful album is one of my favorite piano albums of all time. It is also made poignant by the fact that Robert Rich seriously injured his right hand after the release of the album, an event which mostly ended his piano-playing career, though he is still fine on flutes, guitars, percussion, and synthesizers.

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The brightest star in the ambient galaxy, in my opinion and many others' as well, is Steve Roach. Born and raised in Southern California, Roach moved to Tucson, Arizona in the late 80s and has been profoundly influenced by the desert environment. Roach has been working with electronic ambient music since the late 60s, and has moved through a number of phases in his career. His earliest published work was heavily influenced by the electronic rock of bands like the famous German group Tangerine Dream, and what is known as the "Berlin school" of electronic rock music, which depended heavily on synthesized rhythms and mechanically repeating sequences of notes programmed into that perennial synthesizer favorite, the "sequencer." (This is now referred to generally as a "looper." But during the 80s Roach evolved his own unmistakable, and much-imitated, personal style.

He really came into his own with his landmark 1988 double album, DREAMTIME RETURN which is inspired by his stay in Australia and his contact with Aborigines and their music. The classic "Roach style" features elegant chords, often from jazz or rock origins, played on synthesizers and stretched out into sonic infinity by reverberation and other processing. Over these "floating chords" are many layers of percussion, special effects, samples, and acoustic instrument tones. This sounds like the recipe for "classic ambient" as I described it in the last post, and it is — because Roach is one of the people who invented classic ambient.

During the 90s, Roach moved into what might be called his "shamanic" period, where he was deeply influenced by the spirituality, rhythms, and music of Native and Aboriginal peoples, as well as his vision of what the music of prehistoric humans might have been. His monumental albums ORIGINS (1993) and ARTIFACTS (1994) are percussion-heavy journeys into a primal vision. They also feature the Australian aboriginal wind instrument known as the didgeridoo. He manages to avoid being either cute or colonialist, mainly by sheer musical devotion. During those years, he collaborated with other musicians such as Mexican percussionist Jorge Reyes and Spanish guitarist Suso Saiz on music influenced by ancient Mesoamerican civilizations. Some of these albums are FORGOTTEN GODS (1993) and EARTH ISLAND (1994).

At the same time, Roach was creating music which I like to call "desert space music." The finest example of this style, and definitely one of Roach's best works ever, is the 1992 2-CD set WORLD'S EDGE. While this uses plenty of rhythm, it is more expansive and futuristic, evoking images of vast skies and turbulent weather, desert landscapes and blazing sunlight, and the brilliant stars and space of an Arizona night. There's a kind of heroic quality to Roach's music, which is most evident here. It's also "American" in the best way, not explicitly patriotic or chauvinistic but built from the "American" ideals of optimism, invention, resourcefulness, perseverance, and courage in the wilderness. In a way, Roach is the Aaron Copland of ambient music. As a Southwestern desert visionary, he might also be considered the "Georgia O'Keefe" of ambient music.

But there's another side to Roach (actually, many sides). The second CD of the WORLD'S EDGE set, "To the Threshold of Silence," is an hour-long foray into "dark ambient," influenced by Tibetan Buddhist ritual music as well as shamanic drumming, all fading into the infinite dark spaces (made possible, as always, by that blessed digital reverb!). Roach goes even further into that dark energy in the 1996 album THE MAGNIFICENT VOID, which dispenses with percussion and consists almost entirely of long, sustained synthesizer notes in big, built-up layers, oscillating in a slow, pendulum-like rhythm. It's very spooky and cosmological.

I'm leaving out dozens of solo and collaborative works here, which can be found, along with sound samples, on Roach's discography page. Roach's creativity won't let him rest. He hates standing still stylistically just because he has once achieved a good combination of sounds. He has made explorations into things as diverse as cowboy music (DUST TO DUST, 1997), progressive rock (THE LEAVING TIME, 1988, with Michael Shrieve and David Torn, among others), and long-form "environmental" ambient, for instance THE DREAM CIRCLE (1994) and SLOW HEAT (1998). He's also collaborated with some of the other luminaries of ambient music such as Robert Rich, "Vidna Obmana," and "Vir Unis," who I'll be talking about in the next installment.

At the end of the 1990s, Roach moved away from his "shamanic" period, and entered into yet another new world of musical inspiration. As it often happens, some of this was due to technical innovations. The application of computers and fractals to sound and rhythm generation brought forth a new way to add depth to electronic music. The main rhythmic beat can have endlessly changing layers of sub-beats inside each measure, and tone-colors can be made of shimmering textures rather than just individual notes. In 1999 Roach released his brilliant album LIGHT FANTASTIC which adds a cyber-dimension to his signature "desert spacemusic." His collaborations with "Vir Unis," such as BODY ELECTRIC (1999) and BLOOD MACHINE (2001) also feature this new computer-aided complexity.

His big solo album for 2001 was CORE, which I regard as a "retrospective" of 20 years of Roachmusic. Each track alludes to a style or theme he has explored over those years. CORE is also one of his most emotionally intense creations; this is definitely not "ambient" in the old sense of background mood music. Its frantic rhythms and dissonant harmonies no longer look back to a world of shamans and mystics but to the present and future world of uncertainty and terror.

Yet at the same time he was already working on his major release for 2003, a vast 4-CD set named MYSTIC CHORDS AND SACRED SPACES. There are nearly 5 hours of music on this set; it's as long as Wagner's PARSIFAL if you play it all at once (do not listen while driving or operating heavy machinery). Like his earlier MAGNIFICENT VOID, MYSTIC CHORDS is composed exclusively of long sustained notes in multiple, slowly shifting layers. There's no wild drumming, no fractal rhythms and no hot special effects. In this set, Roach is influenced not by Aboriginal music or rock or jazz, but by the Late Romantic composers of the 19th and 20th century such as Alexander Scriabin, whose grand mystical chord made of a "spiral of fourths" inspired some of the harmonies in MYSTIC CHORDS. Though this is one of Roach's finest efforts so far, MYSTIC CHORDS is also one of his less "accessible" works. It isn't something that automatically lights up your audiosphere. You have to approach it by learning its "language" of slow chord changes and long spaces. MYSTIC CHORDS is esoteric; I would even call it "initiatory," as it is explicitly music for an inner journey.

All these albums can be found by going to the Roach website, though some of them are out of print. The site has sound-samples available. Roach has his own private label, "Timeroom Editions," and sells his albums, from all labels, from the website.

The reason, in my opinion, why Roach can carry so many styles, and be so prolific without losing quality, is that he is the most "musical" of ambient/electronic composers. That is, he chooses chords, harmonies, rhythms, textures, and tone-colors which are innovative and make musical sense no matter what the genre is, and he knows how to pace an album so that there is never too much of the same thing. (This doesn't apply to his minimalist "environment" works, which are meant to be the same thing all the way through.) Because his style is so characteristic, Roach is easily imitated, but you can immediately hear the difference between Roach and his imitators. He has inspired what I call the "school of Steve Roach" among a whole generation of ambient musicians in the US and Europe. He has worked with some of them directly as producer and mentor; others just hear his work and imitate him. Some of them, such as Biff Johnson and the Spanish Max Corbacho are quite good in their own right. Others, not to be named here, range from "generic Roach" to slavish imitation. But while these guys are still making music like Roach in the 90s, Roach has raced on ahead into the 21st century.

A note from 2009. It has been five years since I wrote this article. Since 2004, Steve Roach has continued to produce albums in his various styles, some by himself and some with collaborators. He has done percussion albums with shamanic drummer Byron Metcalf (NADA TERMA, 2008) and a guitar and electronic album with Norwegian guitarist Erik Wollo (STREAM OF THOUGHT, also 2008). In 2005, Roach made an interesting excursion into non-tonal noise with his POSSIBLE PLANET. Also during these years, Roach has been releasing albums derived from his live performances such as 2007's ARC OF PASSION. In the other direction, toward minimalism and "environmental" sound albums, he has produced the "Immersion" series in which repeating looped patterns of tones at low levels produce an almost subliminal effect.

Roach has not neglected his "classic" style, the desert space music he is so well-known for. In 2008 he released LANDMASS, a musical evocation of geological spaces, and just this year, in April, Roach came forth with what I think is his best album since MYSTIC CHORDS. This is DYNAMIC STILLNESS, a 2-CD set of journeys into vastness. It is more serene and less scary than MYSTIC CHORDS, but I would not speculate that Roach is getting "mellow" in his middle years. There's a long way to go yet on Roach's road.

Next: other first-magnitude stars of the ambient firmament.

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