Steve Roach, Kevin Braheny, Michael Stearns - Desert Solitaire (1989)

Sun-baked ambient/superior new-age from three masters of the craft.  Roach I know fairly well, and featured him here not long ago; Braheny and Stearns were names I'd heard, perhaps heard the odd track a while back, so was very happy to pick up this collaborative effort between all three of them the other week.  Desert Solitaire was based on the book of the same name by writer and naturalist Edward Abbey, who died shortly before the album's release and thus became its dedicatee. 

Roach, Braheny and Stearns approached recording with the intent of evoking America's natural landscapes in the same way that the first two of them had with Western Spaces three years previous, but this time with extra desert: in long, parched drones that evoked scorching, barely breathable air and exploration at the mercy of oppressive sunlight.  Given this intent, don't let the beat-driven album opener put you off - it's merely the start of the journey.  Soon the album opens up, with early highlight Specter sounding like Eno In The Mojave.

The tracklist indicates which musician(s) was/were the main composer(s) for each piece, which varies throughout, giving the album a good sense of variety, even though just 65 minutes of unrelenting drones of this quality would've been impressive enough.  Braheny's Knowledge & Dust adds flute and percussive effects to evoke Native Americans on a vision quest encountering a rattlesnake, and the low tones in Stearns' Shiprock are intended to represent the inner sounds of stones and minerals.  If that's starting to sound a bit new agey, don't worry - there's more sun-bleached, heavy-air drone still to come.

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Steve Roach - The Magnificent Void (1996)

It's hard to think of any review that could describe this album more succinctly than its three-word title does, but nevertheless, here's a few lines on Steve Roach's journey into vast emptiness from the mid-90s.  Best known for his 1980s masterpieces Structures From Silence and Dreamtime Return, this turn into a much more darker ambient deserves to be equally celebrated.

Whether The Magnificent Void evokes for you travel through the endless blackness of space (and a lot of it would make superior sci-fi soundtrack music), or philosophical contemplation of the void of unconscious non-existence (which seems to have been Roach's intent, given the quotation from acid-psychiatrist Stanislav Grof), it's a keeper.  70 minutes of well-arranged, ice cold synth sweeps, occasional eerie voices and shimmers of an unknowable light make The Magnificent Void a journey worth taking multiple times.

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