- A keystone in the history of ambient music still sounds unique 40 years later.
- There's a certain quirkiness to the first generation of ambient music. Some classics are inseparable from this quality, like Mort Garson's Plantasia, a daffy curio of '70s wellness culture. Others, like Suzanne Ciani's Seven Waves, bear a whiff of the era but ultimately transcend it. What's striking about Steve Roach's 1984 album Structures From Silence is how stone-faced it is. The twinkling astral landscape on the cover might suggest otherwise—and the vintage Oberheim textures make it fairly easy to place in the post-Eno, pre-Orb interzone—but Structures From Silence feels unstuck from time, somehow unscathed by the residual goofiness of its era.
Structures From Silence was a breakthrough for Roach, then 29, whose first two albums took heavy influence from Tangerine Dream's sequencer-forward sound. By excising drums entirely and emphasising what he called "breathing chords," the Southern California composer was able to land on a sound as expansive and impassive as the deserts he loved. His 1980s run continued with three albums of Quiet Music and the towering double-CD release Dreamtime Return, which kicked off a longstanding fascination with Australia that occasionally steers his music towards worldbeat cliché. But Structures From Silence stands alone in his discography—and in ambient music history—as one of the greatest albums of pure synth music.
It's hard to think of any real-world analogue to the synth sounds Roach uses on Structures From Silence. They sound vaguely like a choir and vaguely like a string section, completely featureless except for a slight metallic tinge, and they fade out so slowly, as if being played loudly from far away. The goal is to create an impression of monolithic hugeness, of geological processes occurring on glacial timetables; listening to this music is like staring into a vertical rock face. Roach says he heard this music in his head before playing it, which just adds to the mystery of an album that sounds less like it was played than like it emanated from the earth.
"Reflections in Suspension" and "Quiet Friend," the first two tracks on Structures From Silence, allow sparkling sequencers to rise above the chords. There's a sense of awe, placing the listener in the perspective of an outsider struck by the vastness of their surroundings. The 30-minute title track, meanwhile, plays like a response from nature itself. The bass notes on Roach's Oberheim open up chasms every few seconds, and the chord progression never resolves. It hangs in the air, holding you outside, making you an observer.
In his notes for this 40th anniversary edition, Roach claims his "desire to live within a sonic space that would provide a sense of safety, soul-nurturing comfort and time suspension" drove him to create the music. The idea of time suspension is crucial to Roach, who took the advent of the CD as an opportunity to release sprawling double albums like Dreamtime Return and 1992's World's Edge—and who used a 30th anniversary reissue of Structures From Silence in 2014 as an opportunity to triple the album's runtime with new material.
All three hours of material from the 2014 reissue—the original album, plus four new tracks averaging about half an hour apiece—is present on this new reissue and remaster from Projekt. "Suspension" and "Reflection" are about the same length as "Structures From Silence" but feel a lot rosier, with less of the elemental dread of the original album. "Beyond" and "Below" are darker, brooding in the low-end and leaning into more metallic textures. These pieces extend the album's mood pleasantly, but they struggle to distinguish themselves individually—especially in contrast to "Structures From Silence," which towers above this landscape like a peak in a vast plain.
It's a treat to spend more time in the album's world, but Structures From Silence actually feels bigger in its original version, where the title track is allowed to sit astride the album rather than blending in as one behemoth among many. It's easier to suspend time while marinating in a three-hour album, but an even more impressive feat is to create an hour-long album that feels immeasurably vast.
Tracklist01. Reflections In Suspension
02. Quiet Friend
03. Structures From Silence
04. Suspension
05. Reflection
06. Beyond
07. Below