Light Fantastic | 
 enlarge | Artist: Steve Roach
Label: Hearts of Space
Category: Music
List Price: $16.98
Buy New: $11.26
You Save: $5.72 (34%)
New (17) Used (9) from $4.95
Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 199195
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 5 x 0.5
UPC: 025041109420
EAN: 0025041109420
ASIN: B00000K2BM
Release Date: September 21, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: BRAND NEW, Factory Sealed items direct from the Studios. 30 Day Satisfaction Guarantee. Quick International Airmail!
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| Tracks:
| • | Trip the Light | | • | Breathing the Pulse | | • | The Reflecting Chamber | | • | Touch the Pearl | | • | Realm of Refraction | | • | The Luminous Return |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
The high priest and wizard king of the ostensibly New Age corner of the ambient movement, Steve Roach is an American Brian Eno, except where Eno's ambient classics track a very British interior terrain, Roach musically maps the mysteries of the American Southwest. But like Eno, he's always been as much about rhythm and percussion as space and texture, and as much a music futurist as a sound designer. Like this year's Body Electric, Light Fantastic couples techno-inspired, tribalesque breakbeats and jungle grooves with thick washes of "Roach-tone"--a glistening, rapturous synthesizer sound that is to electronic-hero Roach what "woman-tone" is to guitar-hero Eric Clapton. Peppered with tribal percussion, the drum & bass kickoff "Trip the Light" suggests a panethnic Photek, while the haunting "Breathing the Pulse" evokes Roach's eerie Magnificent Void, albeit undercut with a thickly layered, gurgling rhythm--what programmer Vir Unis calls a "fractal groove." Touches of tamboura, filter sweeps, and searing glasslike washes deliver on Roach's desire to "create sounds that gave off a laserlike illumination." Enlightening. --James Rotondi
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| Customer Reviews:
 Another Perfect Recording September 12, 2006
Matthew Diamond (Seattle, Wash.)
Here is another of the rare perfect recordings. Composed right before Steve set up his own Timeroom label, "Light Fantastic" delivers another phenomenal impact of sound and reverberations that create a great sense of vastness without ever using your vision. My favorite track is number four, 'Touch the Pearl' with its glowing, shimmering waveforms that are, intentionally or not, attuned directly to the core of consciousness. It flows for an awesome nine minutes seamlessly into Track 5, 'Realm of Refraction.' Here we have the genius of pure ambience at work, flowing, deliberate and seemingly without beginning or end.
Mr. Roach has no equal in this realm. He is truly a master of his instrumentation that does for the mind what a good diet and exercise program do for the body.
Although I cannot prove it, since I have been listening to Steve Roach's compositions (the first was 'Dreamtime Return,' 1987), my memory and concentration have improved ten fold, as well as my ability to stay focused on one thing. I am more relaxed, rested and attuned to my task at hand, whatever that may be. In other words, whether such positive benefits were intended or not, Steve Roach's music is a therapeutic remedy for mood swings, obsessive/compulsive disorder, insomnia, various forms of stress disorders and who knows what else. If it were not true, I would have told you. After nearly 20 years of being hooked on Roach, I can tell you with all certainty that nearly all of his compositions are not to be missed--essential to deal with and dissipate the petty cares of this world. No way I'm going to let someone with a lesser mind tell me that this is only a mundane, banal recording lacking nothing new. While I'm listening to 'Light Fantastic' the earth seems as small as a dot, and I feel like I have escaped the troubles of this world. I only hate to come back to reality. Some of his other fantastic trips are 'Quiet Music' (1988), 'Solitaire: on Ritual Ground,' 'Western Spaces,' 'Origins' and 'Mystic Chords and Sacred Spaces' (disc two). I am really looking forward to my next trek on Steve's upcoming composition, the Immersion series, where there is only one track each disc over 70 minutes long.
Funny, sure doesn't seem like it. Roach's music make an hour seem like a split second. That's what they say when you really enjoy something. A good pair of headphones with bass boost and repeat on sets the stage for the next voyage of consciousness exploration for which there is no other equal to date. A little less I talk, a lot more I listen.
This Is A Beautiful Album! August 6, 2005
Mike Smith
I am very pleased with this album. It sure is something special. I don't like all of Steve Roach's work, but Light Fantastic is fantastic! Great for mind journeys and relaxation.
mirrors February 26, 2005
Christopher S. Loucks (Colorado Front Range)
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
Think splendor, radiant gloss, flames of blues, green galaxies, shimmering lightning, if possible, and northern lights, the aurora of tempered hypnogogia. Sheen, dim luster, cracks of ice, scintillating nimbostratus enshrouding the dazzle of white sparks from within, skies that emicate, fires that fly, meteors and sprites and fluoro-luminescent vapors glorifying a spectrum of sheer, colored phosphors, energies that refract, glare, twinkle, glitter and sparkle. This could be space, this could be water, this could be air, but it is a medium veiled in light. Black with light. Bright with light...
(Submersion -CL)
T r i p t h e L i g h t ∂n≈An aural alembic, refining, purifying atoms vibrating, wavelengths shifting, pulsing, expanding. Play this track in fast-forward and one can hear the twisting of sound...
B r e a t h i n g t h e P u l s e (x)≈Mist quickly dissipates into Steve Roach's trademark pitch-dropped, time-expanded instruments of bubbles. More pulses of photons, compressed, scattered, and ebullient with velocity. This is not tribal, this is scientific...
T h e R e f l e c t i o n C h a m b e r hn/ ≈The zing, the rise of crescents over slow effervescence, where rainbows converge, crossmix, coalesce, and melt into the rays of shine, reflecting off atmospheres, spheres, fears...
T o u c h t h e P e a r l ∑(Ω)≈ Here there is no incidence, only the circumvenital, travelling a long arc of brilliance, iridescence, but it is not calming. There is disturbance here, the most difficult track to relax or think to. But there is silence, a separation of the next two tracks, a pair...
(Ascension -CL)
R e a l m o f R e f r a c t i o n sin∆/sinss≈Above all planes, parallel to consciousness, a principle of suspension, flotation. Emotion becomes foam, fizzling and churning, recrudescing into a motif, repeated in these two tracks. This is where we see the atmosphere, the green flash, the haunted glories, pillars, and cool retrorefractions...
T h e L u m i n o u s R e t u r n∞≈Darkest, where one sees the fires of the empyrean, a celestial drift and obvious descension from heights attained. Slower, with less emphasis on tempo, but beaming, defining smooth curves, light strikes, gradiations. Below you, the albedo of your Blue, the cloud of your Silver, diaphanous and glassy. Epic in scope, a virtual tour of optics and air...
Like looking down onto the smooth plane of water, Light Fantastic mirrors what we see looking up.
For physical manifestations, I recommend: http://www.lightspace.org/installations.htm
A fantastic CD June 25, 2003
Denise G. Sifuentes (Mammoth Lakes, CA United States)
This CD waas the beginning of my collection and once I heard it I was hooked. All the songs are flowing and very imaginative and leaves one with daydreams alive. It has become one of my favorites and I listened to it so many times I knew I needed to purchase more so as not to tire of it. Overall I would give this CD a high rating and suggest it to anyone looking for some decent ambient music.
Innovative and delightful September 30, 2002
tiki man (DC)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
One of Roach's strongest gifts is his ability to work with the title of the given cd, invoking a masterful sense to create a theme based work. I have known blind people who have heard this and this truly gave them a better understaning of the beauty of textures of visible light.Upon it's release I was already a massive Roach fan and once again this one shattered any notion I ever held of Roach being bound to any form of convential creative direction. He knows how to forge ahead with a ceaseless prolific nature, yet no matter how many titles he releases, each one sounds fresh and adventurous, taking us in new directions with his skill to bend time and space. In this case, he is bending and refracting the visible light spectrum through his trademark long, gorgeous synth washes and otherworldly sounding beats and grooves. This is not one of his more meditative releases in the strictess senses; this instead will appeal to any fan of pulsing electro hybrid grooves and searing, almost dissonant but never overbearing or messy clusters of synth textures. Another bold musical statement from the massive palate of sound colors that Roach 'paints' with. He often states in interviews that he feels more like a sculpture or painter than a convential musician and this disc is a perfect example of his philosophy.
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