Steve Roach/Dirk Serries - Low Volume Music [Projekt - 2012]“Low Volume Music” brings together US ambient legend Steve Roach, and Belgium based guitarist & ambient composer Dirk Serries for an album of entrancing/ soothing synth & guitar based ambience. The pair have worked together in the past on various collaborative releases( when Serries went under the pseudonym of Vidna Obmana), but it's some ten years since they’ve worked together. Listening to this album it sounds like they’ve never been apart, as the pair bound their respective ambient tools together in a effortless & deeply enchanting embrace. The album offers up five tracks that fall between the eight to just over fifteen minute mark. And each track finds the pair weaving hypnotic ambient structures that follow slowly circling & minimal ambient patterns- with Roach’s synth work weaving & drifting through Serries often repetitive yet deeply entrancing guitar textures. The mood of the tracks goes from drifting warming, through to hypnotically melancholic, onto slow motion & dreamingly expansive. “Low Volume Music” is highly spell- biding ambient release, which finds both Roach & Serries at the height of their powers. Certainly this is one of the most rewarding Roach releases in recent memory, and it’s also one of the ambient highlights of the year, which I can see myself returning to again & again. Roger Batty
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