Recorded at Timeroom, Tucson, Arizona and The Kiva Studios, Prescott, Arizona between 1999-2000.
Composer: Steve Roach.
Personnel: Steve Roach (piano, synthesizer); Jorge Reyes (vocals, flute, ocarina, percussion); Jim Cole (vocals); Vicki Richards (violin); Byron Metcalf (bass drum, frame drum, djembe, rainsticks, shaker, tom tom, percussion).
Audio Mixer: Steve Roach.
Recording information: The Kiva, Tucson, AZ (1999-2000); Timeroom, Tucson, AZ (1999-2000).
Unknown Contributor Role: Vir Unis.
Arranger: Steve Roach.
Certainly the year 2000 didn't see the elder statesman of electronic music slow down in the slightest. On the contrary, Steve Roach ushered in the new millennium with some of the most personal, evocative and finest recordings of his long career, this collaboration with Byron Metcalf being just one of them. THE SERPENT'S LAIR finds Roach revisiting the primordial caverns and blasted landscapes of his seminal mid-1990s adventures. Only this time, the sonic alchemist has embroidered these rhythmic trance-dances with not only Metcalf's percussive expertise, but a further evolved sense of soundsculpting, richer and more intense than even his previous excursions into the sonic wild.
This beautifully-packaged two-disc set excavates pure sensory nirvana out of aural-chemical devices. Roach's concept of 'groove alchemy', the extreme way in which sounds are ultimately condensed, interwoven and reintegrated during the studio-mixing process, fairly dissolves the speaker fabric during the omnipotent electro-opus "Cave Dwellers" and the mind-burst miasma cooked up on "Egg Chamber Dreaming." Turn out the lights, tune in, close your eyes and prepare for altered states.
Professional Reviews
Alternative Press (3/01, p.88) - 4 out of 5 - "...Another masterwork of trancey layers of synth breathing through a dancing skeleton of tribal rhythms, rattles and woodwinds..."
