🎶 Steve Roach - Dreamtime Return (Full Album)

Track List:

1) Towards The Dream
2) The Continent
3) Songline
4) Airtribe Meets The Dream Ghost
5) A Circular Ceremony
6) The Other Side (composed by Kevin Braheny)
7) Magnificent Gallery
8) Truth In Passing
9) Australian Dawn (The Quiet Earth Cries Inside)
10) Looking For Safety
11) Through A Strong Eye
12) The Ancient Day
13) Red Twilight With The Old Ones
14) The Return

The history of Steve Roach’s definitive album, 1988’s Dreamtime Return, is the history of a musician isolating himself on an authentic desert trying to recount the visual experience of a place as wild and dazzling as the Primitive Australian continent. The experience inevitably brought him to contact Aboriginal people and ask for a collaboration with him for the occasion of his newest studio album. The line-up in the album includes two Aboriginal players and New Age composer Kevin Braheny.

The title’s name indicates the principal Aboriginal religious concept, the Dreamtime. The Dreamtime is a sort of genesis that explains the creation of the world and man through the deeds of ancient, primordial titans who shaped the soil and water with their actions. The concept explores also themes of birth, death and time through intensely nostalgic themes and imagery. Dreamtime is essentially an Aborigine alternative to the ancient Pagan myths that spread through Europe much later. It dates back some 65,000 years.

During the Dreamtime it is said that the creators made men women and animals, declared the laws of the land and how people were to behave to one another, the customs of food supply and distribution, the rituals of initiation, the ceremonies of death which are required to be performed so that the spirit of the dead travels peacefully to his or her spirit-place, and the laws of marriage.

Some Dreamings told of the mythical creators disappearing. They believed that the creators disappeared from the sight of mere mortals, but continued to live in secret places. Some lived in the tribe’s territory in rock crevices, trees and water holes. Others went up into the sky above as heavenly bodies. Others changed into (or perhaps became) natural forces such as wind, rain, thunder and lightning.

It is believed that many of the creators continued to live on the land or in the sky above watching over them. These supernatural enigmatic creators were often referred to as men and women who had the ability to change shape into animals and other creatures such as the Rainbow Serpent, an immortal being and creating God. The connection between snake and rainbow suggests the cycle of the seasons and the significance of them and water in human life. When a rainbow is seen in the sky, it is supposed to be the Rainbow Serpent traveling from one waterhole to another. And what of the so-called Min Min lights?, the amazing yet disquieting phenomenon that has often been reported in the outback skies? Could there be another explanation for them besides the result of unknown geophysical phenomena? For those who've experienced them silently whizzing above in the night sky there's a distinct feeling that one is glimpsing something quite otherworldly.

The Dreamtime may be difficult for many of us to understand fully but it is part of who the Aboriginal people are, the very essence and reason for being here. It is all encompassing and will forever be at the center of their existence as a people.