Midnight Moon is a 70 minute-plus collection of haunting, minimal, deep-of-the-night, mood-drenched pieces. This is the release on which Steve began exploring his own style of atmospheric, processed guitar-based zones, approaching the instrument as a new tool to create quietly moving moodscapes. An album of meditations on solitude and quiet introspection.

Touching the ineffable, this music presents a meditation on solitude and quiet isolation. Atmospheric music in the true sense of the word. This slow swirling lattice of smokey melodic-harmonic patterns rises and falls out of the silence which becomes an equal component with the music. Midnight Moon will appeal to anyone who has appreciated the purely atmospheric side of Roach’s influential style over the last two decades.

The recording was conceived in 1998 when Steve began to explore his own style of atmospheric, processed guitar-based zones, approaching the instrument “with a beginner’s mind, the Tabula Rasa, or clean slate.” Steve comments, “I set off with no technical understanding or desire to develop in any sense of a conventional guitar player.”

In the end, it is the music that always matters. After extensive looping and processing, the sound has an indigo hue, often beyond recognition of what the original source could have been. The result is one of pure introspection, offering a perfect flow of mood-altering soundworlds for infinite repeat-mode playback. In a world obsessed with categorizing all aspects of artistic expression, Midnight Moon is another offering to the unnamed, ineffable realm of pure ambient – atmospheric music, one that Steve Roach expresses with quiet nobility.

CD in jewel box.