A cosmic touchstone. Highly influential and ahead of its time. For the unfamiliar, Michael Stearns’s work was regularly featured on the Hearts of Space radio show, and his large catalogue of output includes scores for movies like Chronos and Samsara. In terms of purity of spaciousness, I can’t help but think of Steve Roach’s Structures from Silence (and unsurprisingly, the two went on to collaborate on several projects), but this is much denser and more detailed, filling in the gaps between broad instrumental strokes with many smaller layered sounds. It’s gorgeous stuff, and having realized that it’s been awhile since I posted anything in this wheelhouse, I think this is the most polished return to form I can think of. Try it in headphones!
Beautiful! Thank you, Jen.
This one is a flat-out MASTERPIECE, not only Michael Stearns’ defining album (although he released further excellent works later on, such as Encounter, none of them gave a better overview of Stearns’ strengths as a synthesizer player and a composer) but also one of the cornerstones of any collection of New Age or ambient music.
It’s simply amazing how the listener’s attention is constantly engaged by basically a series of impossibly expressive washes of intricately layered bleeps and pulses, without any need to resort to melodic hooks or sonic gimmicks. The warm sound of the Serge synthesizer obviously helps in that respect, but a quick comparison with Stearns’ more irregular follow-up album “M’Ocean” shows the merit of making 48 minutes of densely arranged sound flow as gracefully as if they had been just improvised.
its time is coming, and but soon,,,,,https://www.redeyerecords.co.uk/vinyl/91807-erc-056-michael-stearns-planetary-unfolding
One of the epic ambient albums. This is an every other year listen. That way it never gets old. This was on regular rotation on John Schaffer’s “New Sounds” when it was released. For a time it was out of print and the cd copies were going for $100+ for a while. Now if we could get LaMonte Young to put “The Well Tempered Piano”, in WAV, om Bandcamp..