A Journey from Space Music to Ambient & Beyond with Steve Roach in Echoes Podcast

John Diliberto – Steve Roach – Linda Kohanov at Big Ears Festival 2025

This year at the Big Ears Festival 2025, John Diliberto moderated two panels with some of the leading musicians of our time. In today’s podcast, we’ll hear his session with Steve Roach and Linda Kohanov.

Steve Roach is a seminal American ambient and electronic composer whose career spans over four decades and more than 150 releases. Coming out of Progressive Rock and bands like Yes, Roach was profoundly influenced by the deep space moods of German electronic pioneers Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. Their extended analog explorations and sequencing laid the groundwork for his own immersive, long-form compositions.

Roach released his debut album, Now, in 1982 and broke through with Structures from Silence (1984), a landmark recording that is the template for serene, contemplative music with its slowly evolving melodies and textures. He expanded the genre further with Dreamtime Return (1988), merging synthesizers with acoustic instruments and field recordings, inspired by his journey into Aboriginal culture and the Australian outback. Since then his music has traversed ambient Americana, drone zone, and sequencer-driven works. His return to analog modular synthesis created landmark albums like Skeleton Keys.

Steve Roach at Big Ears Festival in Church Street United Methodist Church

Based in the desert southwest, Roach’s music often reflects the vastness and solitude of the landscapes around him. He is catholic in his approach, embracing modular and analog synths, digital instruments, computers, and organic instrumentation including the didgeridoo and fujara, to create deeply meditative and trance-inducing sound worlds. His work continues to influence ambient, new age, and electronic artists worldwide, and he remains an active performer and recording artist from his Timehouse studio in Arizona. He performed for three consecutive nights at Big Ears Festival 2025.

Linda Kohanov is an author, speaker, and equine-facilitated learning pioneer whose work bridges the worlds of psychology, animal communication, and leadership development. She emerged in the 1990s with a background in radio and music journalism. She was program director of Echoes affiliate WUWF-FM, Pensacola and she’s written for Jazziz, Pulse, Downbeat and CD Review, among others. An equestrian, her book The Tao of Equus (2001) introduced a new paradigm of human-animal relationships, blending myth, neuroscience, and personal narrative into an exploration of the horse as teacher. The wife of Steve Roach, she has recently returned to her original passion for music. She studied classical violin and played in symphonic orchestras, and now has taken up the 5-string electric violin and begun performing with Roach.

They joined John Diliberto on-stage at Big Ears Festival on a panel called A Journey from Space Music to Ambient & Beyond with Steve Roach. We’ll hear our wide-ranging conversation.

Thanks to Big Ears Festival, founder Ashley Capps and the BE crew for setting up this session and allowing us to put it in the podcast. Watch in the next two weeks for my Big Ears session with Michael Rother, Bob Holmes and Mary Lattimore.