Heat Composer
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Hi I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook.
Does a hot day have a sound? That's a question music composer Steve Roach has thought about a lot. Roach lives in Tucson, Arizona, known for its searing triple digit temperatures. With more than forty recordings to his credit Roach has used the desert for inspiration in his music. In particular on two CD's entitled "Slow Heat" and Atmospheric Conditions".
"The desert really melts things down and burns away the unimportant. If you really enter into it on its terms as opposed to living in a completely air conditioned, detached environment. (I mean to interface directly with the heat of the desert and with the raw intensity of the landscape) and to let that fill you up inside is something that is so natural for me to do and to express with the music".
"It's absolutely languid, melted, slow, flowingŠand being an artist and having my own approach to how I create sounds is very subjective, but there's a certain, I guess the word would sometimes be a higher frequency, a higher searing kind of quality that I'll bring in there that almost has a sizzle to it".
"You can just feel that electricity in the air. And for me that feeling when the body starts to dissolve the boundaries of our skin and your sense of being inside a form can really melt away with just the right combination of temperature and expanse".
Our interview with Steve Roach was produced for The Weather Notebook by Jeff Rice. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is generously supported by Subaru.
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