Favorite: Across The View; all gems!

Track Listing

1. Breathing Stone
2. Desert Walkabout
3. New Moon at Forbidden Mesa
4. Desert Prayer
5. In the Heat of Venus
6. Slow Turning
7. Western Spaces

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #434422 in Music
• Released on: 1990-10-25
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
Praised for its eloquent portrayal of the desert experience, Ken Gruen of New Frontier asserted, "Western Spaces is as mysterious and captivating as the land from which it takes its name." Keyboard was also impressed with the recording's potency: "This stuff doesn't just lie there simpering, it gets up and walks."

Western Spaces opens with The Breathing Stone, a spacious, shimmering aural excursion by Roach. Kevin Braheny's Desert Walkabout is a celebration of the sense of freedom inspired by the timeless beauty of arid vistas. The two synthesists collaborate on Desert Prayer, a lyrical reflection that conveys a reverence for the serenity of this uncompromising landscape. Roach and Brennan's In The Heat Of Venus explores the mystery and sensuality of the extreme conditions that are always at play with one's perception and personal integrity in the desert. Roach, Braheny, and Burmer join forces on the title cut, an expansive musical commentary on infinite visions of bare rock and cloudless skies.

Amazon.com
Combining Roach's ambiance with Braheny's lyrical passages on electronic woodwinds, Western Spaces was the first of two collaborations based on the landscapes of the American Southwest--in particular the Mojave and Sonoran deserts. The ambient "New Moon at Forbidden Mesa" contains hints of high winds, muted angelic voices, and echoing coyote howls, while "Desert Prayer," opening with a cathedralesque keyboard figure, introduces a synthesized vocal sound not unlike a violin or a Middle Eastern cantor. Where later Roach albums deal strictly in color and timbre, Spaces incorporates the idea of melodic text. The solo voices and arpeggiated figures become a narrative that knits together the streams of consciousness expressed through layers of drone and percussion--like a sidewinder leaving trails across the desert floor. --James Rotondi

New Frontier
"Western Spaces is as mysterious and captivating as the land from which it takes its name."

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Customer Reviews

Inspiring...
The awe and picturesque environs of the Southwest have long provided inspiration to writers and painters. What better way to bring out the desolation, expansiveness, and metaphor of the region than via state-of-the-art electronics? Roach, of course, was already investigating the means whereby organica becomes electronica on his classic DREAMTIME RETURN set. Together with fellow synthesist Braheny, Roach again uses his amazing conceptual acumen to bring out the desert's unrevealed secrets.
Listening to "In the Heat of Venus," you can also see the heat haze wafting sinuously through the air and circling the mountain's edges-a spell woven with kalimbas, woodblock percussion, and synthesizers whose sounds are burned amber-red. "Desert Walkabout" embraces a more elegiac, serene, and almost classical sensibility, shot through with Braheny's ghostly electronic wind-instrument caterwauls, mock-harp spicing, delicate percussives, and Roach's lonesome synth chords. Check your compass at the door, and melt into the horizon.

wide open spaces
This wonderfully sublime album comes from Roach's "atmospheric ambient" period of the late 1980s that produced 'Dreamtime Return' and 'Desert Solitaire,' among other works. There is a good deal of the Southwest outdoors that Roach loves on this work, and the pieces breathe with the same kind of expansiveness and natural harmony that made 'Dreamtime' such a success. The original release of 'Western Spaces' in 1987 included works by Richard Burmer; these are deleted in the 1990 Fortuna version. This is truly too bad, because one of those pieces is "Across the View," Burmer's signature work and one of the few ambient compositions yet produced that justly deserves the tag "masterpiece." Even without it, however, this one is well worth the listen.

Roach's first official collaboration
Ambient/space music pioneer Steve Roach worked with other artists before Western Spaces, but this is his first official collaboration for strictly discographic purposes. Originally released on Innovative Communications (a label founded by Klaus Schulze, Roach's primary musical influence), the album contained contributions by Richard Burmer, who was cut out when the album was re-released on Fortuna Records in 1990. Western Spaces remains one of Roach's most beautiful releases--the solo track by Braheny and "Desert Prayer" are perhaps the best, but the Roach/ Thom Brennan piece "In the Heat of Venus" is astounding---I don't think Roach has recorded a more powerful piece of music since, quite honestly, though some could argue effectively against that I'm sure-- Dreamtime Return may be the only exception.