Dynamic Stillness

One of Steve Roach’s darkest works, 2009’s Dynamic Stillness plays out across two CDs and earns every minute, a remarkable demonstration of his abilities to create haunted and chilled electronic atmospheres and compositions without being simply alienating or forbidding. Beginning with the forty minute long “Birth of Still Places,” with deep echoing tones set against a quiet, soft motif that provides a strange anchor, Dynamic Stillness embodies the seeming contradiction of its name by feeling like energetic motion without a single beat or rhythm of note.