I like how this album starts, with the weather forecast from Danish radio - Greetings from Father Sky. Bob creates soundscapes of stunning beauty and serenity. He is working with samples, lots of good 'ethnic' drumming on two tracks, eclectic keyboard sounds and a lot of feeling. It is quite an achievement to assemble so many different sounds and samples, and keep one's centre, while composing and mixing. As on his excellent album Fluidity and Structure we get a good mix of percussion tracks, a lyric piano track, several ambient tracks, a beautifully minimal track called Crust of Dust with the quality of a prayer, and some world music. A quotation from Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game is the key to the mental frame Bob Holroyd sets: 'The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us but lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces...' This record is a pearl, an encouragement to loosen up your mental habits - and your listening habits at the same time.
Kindred Spirits Vol 3 No 11 . DJ


Kicking off with a low-resonating, prayerful mantra, this latest experiment from synthesist Holroyd features a wealth of unusual tonal accents to keep one's attention focused on the music. A brief snippet of an opera diva evolves into the haunting tone of a Native American flute before giving way to the ephemeral textures and electronic repetitions. In Waking The Spirits, an astonishing array of tribal voices arises from Afro-Cuban beats before the music returns to the more subdued tones of the title track. The only consistency in this album is change, and Holroyd leaves no stone unturned. His message is one of spiritual awakening, and each instrumental endeavors to rouse the soul to new heights through sonic baptism.
PJ . New Age Retailer . March/April 1997 . USA


Music is poetry. For Bob Holroyd it is a means for expressing oneself, for dissolving states of mind and inner moods, for clarifying one's relation with the world and with life, for trying to communicate, for improving. His earlier Fluidity and Structure had given sound-settings to images from a long voyage; now Stages communicates even deeper feelings, ones born out of that same voyage. The artist is now aware that he is a citizen of a world where Europeans, Africans, Asians and everyone else share equally in the history of human progress. If the lonely electronic sounds of the beautiful Preying Mantra flow into the wild drumbeats of Waking The Spirits, if the distant muezzin of Stages is mingled with quiet synths and water accompaniments, if street voices are doubled by ney, sax and electric bass, if Steve Reich suddenly appears in the progressions of Darwin's Dream but you then find yourselves in the presence of Celtic airs, and if, once more, you return at the end to the Casbah, don't be surprised. This is music that comes from the soul and that faithfully reports all the signs, all the mysteries and all the nuances of the thousands of cultures present on a single great planet, ideally united within one sound-sign by a sensitive artist, a Western man who is trying to understand his origins and the path followed by humanity passing through situations in a third world that has been exploited, but remains incredibly rich in dignity and things to teach. For a world without discrimination and violence, one united and diverse. A thousand times better, Bob, than all the Internet channels.
Gianluigi Gasparetti . Deep Listenings . Italy


This is one of those times where one should not "judge a book by its cover". In the case of this CD, the cover art leads one to think that the music will be less than first class. However, the sound production is decidedly very good and the music most enjoyable. This is an immensley fulfilling ambient-yet-melodic-and-rhythmic experience. Deliciously fluid, aurally provocative, it displays the sensitive musicality of composer/producer/keyboardist Holroyd. No wonder Stages is being carried by major New Age distributors in this country and is getting tons of airplay on public radio here too. I love the way he uses ambient sounds, such as a creaking door which turns into a sighing sax, 'playing' them as instruments whose voices add musical value, not merely intellectual interest or contrast. The textured layering of sound, the choice and placement of traditional instruments and vocals, the movement and compositional power of one selection after another point unerringly to the enormous and original talent of this British composer. In-store play should overcome any customer hesitation produced by the cover.
Peggy J Randall . NAPRA REview Vol 8 No 3 . USA