71 minutes, 19 seconds

Steve Roach & Vidna Obmana
Somewhere Else

Strikes me as funny that a lot of ambient CDs tend to cluster at the long end of the total-time spectrum. CDs max out at 80 minutes, and it's no stretch to say that upwards of 75% of the ambient discs I own are longer than 70 minutes. Steve Roach is a key culprit here.

And there's nothing wrong with giving people their money's worth on a CD. But if any genre might benefit from some editing, it's ambient music. I understand the sustained mood and texture they're going for, but does every album have to stretch tracks to the 10-minute mark and beyond? (In fact, several Roach CDs are one single, long-playing track, including this collaboration with fellow sound stretcher Vidna Obmana.)

Some ambient composers seem to understand this. And I don't feel like an asshole when I say that Harold Budd usually managed to communicate more in three minutes than Roach can in 20. Maybe that's unfair, considering how different their music is. But come on--70-minute CDs are OK once in a while, but all the time?

Also today:

71:18 Terence Fixmer, Muscle Collection
71:15 Dernière Volonté, Obeir et Mourir (CD 2 of 2)
71:03 Benestrophe, Auric Fires
71:03 Infekktion, Suffering Spirits
71:02 Die Form, Suspiria de Profundis
71:01 Eden, Gateway to the Mysteries
New arrival! 76:14 Displacer, Moon_Phase
New arrival! 74:00 Dither, Amek
New arrival! 73:16 Dither, Summit

73 minutes, 57 seconds

Steve Roach
Streams & Currents

"Prolific" is hardly the word to descibe Steve Roach. I think he released seven albums in 2006 alone, and something approaching 100 total since he began his career, in the late '70s. I can't get into his tribal-ambient stuff, for some reason, but I appreciate the quieter, more purely ambient discs in the vein of his earlier works like Structures from Silence and Quiet Music. Streams & Currents is in this category, but the twist here is that he uses guitar to create the languid atmospheres and long, drawn-out tones. It's a neat trick, and at times it sounds like a way-slowed-down Robin Guthrie--on Quaaludes.

But back to Roach's prodigious output: If an artist can release seven albums in a year, does that make him extraordinarily hardworking and focused? Or does it betray how easy it is to make this kind of ambient electronic music? And if the latter is the case, are we fools for continuing to buy it and encouraging him to make more of the same?

My next thought is, So what if it's easy to make? That doesn't necessarily take away anything from the quality of the music Roach creates. By the same token, it might have been similarly "easy" for Jackson Pollock to drip paint across a canvas. I'm not sure how many of his now-famous paintings he was able to complete in a given year, but even if it were 100, does that detract from the value of his work?

Or is the problem that we consider the artistic value of music differently from that of visual art?

Am I asking too many questions for a Friday?

Also today:

73:56 Imperative Reaction, Eulogy for the Sick Child
73:54 Bitcrush, Enarc
73:53 Steve Roach, Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces
73:52 Steve Roach, Recent Future
73:52 Scrap.edx, Recoil the Void
New arrival! 75:54 Arbre Noir, Madurai
73:52 Silk Saw, Preparing Wars
73:52 Various artists, The Best of Cryogenic Studio (CD 1 of 2)