Steve Roach, Stephen Kent &Kenneth Newby

STEVE ROACH
A longstanding leader in contemporary electronic music, composer and multi-instrumentalist Steve Roach drew on the beauty and power of the earth's landscapes to create lush, meditative soundscapes influential on the emergence of ambient and trance. A onetime professional motorbike racer born in California in 1955, Roach -- inspired by the music of Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Vangelis -- taught himself to play synthesizer at the age of 20; debuting in 1982 with the album Now, his early work was quite reminiscent of his inspirations, but with 1984's Structures from Silence his music began taking enormous strides, the album's expansive and mysterious atmosphere inspired directly by the natural beauty of the southwestern U.S. Subsequent works including 1986's three-volume Quiet Music series honed Roach's approach, his dense, swirling textures and hypnotic rhythms akin to environmental sound sculptures.

In 1988, inspired by the Peter Weir film The Last Wave, Roach journeyed to the Australian outback, with field recordings of aboriginal life inspiring his acknowledged masterpiece, the double-album Dreamtime Return. A year later, he teamed with percussionist Michael Shrieve and guitarist David Torn for The Leaving Time, an experiment in ambient jazz. After relocating to the desert outskirts of Tuscon, Arizona, Roach established his own recording studio, Timeroom, and in the years to follow grew increasingly prolific, creating both as a solo artist and in tandem with acts including Robert Rich, Michael Stearns, Jorge Reyes and Kevin Braheny -- in all, close to two dozen major works in the 1990s alone, all of them located at different points on the space-time continuum separating modern technology and primitive music. His album roster from that decade includes: Strata (1991), Artifacts (1994), Well of Souls (1995), Amplexus (1997), and Dust to Dust (1998). Early Man was released on Projekt in early 2001, followed by one of his many collaborations with Vidna Obmana, Innerzone. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide

STEPHEN KENT
In the Global music scene Stephen Kent is among the most established musicians playing the Didjeridu in a contemporary context. Born English he was raised in E. Africa and Devon, England and in 1981, after several years of work in London with the band Furious Pig, moved to Australia to become Musical Director of Australias Circus Oz. Concern for the plight of Australias Aboriginal peoples was a prime cause in the group's work and this led him to spend time among Aborigines in the center of Australia. This resulted in his learning to play the Didjeridu in 1982.
Returning to Europe in 1983 and basing himself in London and Barcelona, he began a series of music and Contemporary Dance collaborations that increasingly focused on the Didjeridu. On the other hand, he continued to develop his performance skills in the Circus Arts and toured the world for 3 years with Ra Ra Zoo, jumping in and out of a locked suitcase.

KENNETH NEWBY
Electro-acoustic composer Kenneth Newby has released a number of "deep listening" recordings on the Hearts of Space, Extreme, Fathom, and City of Tribes labels, both solo and as a member of Trance Mission and Lights in a Fat City. A student of Western and non-Western musical traditions alike, Newby has studied Balinese and Javanese music and dance firsthand and is a noted scholar of computer music (many of his pieces involve algorithm-based compositional techniques). Like Jon Hassell, Steve Roach, and Pauline Oliveros, among others, Newby's music is a studied integration of ancient and traditional acoustic elements with meticulous and controlled electronic sound generation and manipulation devices, bringing together such influences as Western classical, ambient, and gamelan with sophisticated technology and a contemporary feel.

Born in the U.K., Newby moved from his second home, Canada, to the San Francisco Bay Area in the late '80s, where, among other things, he worked with pre-Wired newtech mag Mondo 2000 as a writer and editor. He began working with local artists such as Stephen Kent and Beth Custer (with whom he would eventually form Trance Mission), and hooked up with the then-San Francisco-based Hearts of Space label, which released his solo debut, Ecology of Souls, in 1992. His longest group projects to date are Lights in a Fat City and Trance Mission, both of which involve more pronounced rhythmic and harmonic elements than his solo work (Newby plays a range of string and percussion instruments). His collaboration with Stephen Kent and Steve Roach, Halcyon Days, was released in 1996, and is probably his most well-known release. City of Tribes released his second solo album, Sirens, in 1997; an expansive landscape of dreamy tribal ambient, it's among his finest work to date. ~ Sean Cooper, All Music Guide