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.