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CD/BOOK
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RM 4174CD
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A note from Lawrence English: "I can't tell you the first time I heard, or heard about, the work of Steve Roden. In my mind he has always been there, inspiring and surprising in equal amounts. Steve's work is utterly personal, quietly provocative, and quite simply spellbinding. Operating between installation, collage, electronics, improvisation and fine art, Steve has carved out a profoundly individual and porous approach to his art practice . . . Steve Roden's work is a poetic recital of sound in time and a celebration of the wonders of sound unfolding, moment to moment, and accumulating in our collective memory. This edition celebrates him, and Oionos captures his acoustic methodologies in full. The accompanying book acts as a disparate map, charting out the many facets of Steve Roden. It includes artworks, images, documents, and texts from Steve, as well as an essay from his long-time collaborator Stephen Vitiello. The edition also features an interview conducted by Robert Takahashi Crouch."
Notes from Steve Roden: "Oionos was created for the exhibition The Grand Promenade, in Athens, Greece. The exhibition took place in various archaeological and historical sites in central Athens, creating a situation for contemporary site-specific works to be in dialogue with their historical surroundings. While it was not originally offered as a possible site, I pleaded with the curator to allow me to work with architect Dimitris Pikionis's Church of St. Dimitris Loumbardiardis, about a ten-minute walk from the main path of the Grand Promenade. Pikionis designed the original promenade which is still visible in several areas, but much of the area's original designs were altered during the 'restoration' before the 2004 Olympics . . . When I first saw the small church it totally took my breath away, and I immediately began to think about a work that could exist in resonance with it -- but not distract from it . . . The audio was built from field recordings and small 'poor' objects such as tin whistles, toy harmonicas, and the like. These 'instruments' suggested by the museum of musical instruments in Athens, where the proper instruments take up most of the museum, but there is a wonderful display case in the basement with musical toys, religious objects, and other sounding devices not considered musical instruments. I felt that these simple things related to Pikionis's ideas about architecture and craft, and his interests in indigenous culture in conjunction with intellectual and modern culture. I felt there could be a relationship."
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CD
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SNS 018CD
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Sonoris announce the release of some important works from the influential and respected artist Steve Roden. These tracks, which mix conceptual composition and musicality, transcend the ambient or lowercase categories too quickly applied to his music, due to its ghostly beauty. In the tradition of John Cage's Cartridge music amplified objects, Steve Roden extracts a fine and delicate music through his manipulation of specific objects, with an apparent simplicity that hides a captivating magic. Whilst reinventing a form of ambient music which is discreet and atmospheric, Steve Roden delivers sound textures, gives shape to color swatches, traces vibrant frequencies and creates visual art objects. Roden, both a visual and a sound artist often tagged as minimal for want of a better description, builds the sound design of a life, a new construction for the future which encompasses architecture, visual arts, and painting in a single form. "The Radio" (1996): The sound sources are derived from the object itself -- the airwaves as well as the internal mechanics (aerial, springs, knobs). Originally released as a mini-CD by Sonoris, this work centered on Roden's voice and found sound loops is now unexpectedly considered a classic and was seen as "a particularly modest form of genius" in a review by The Wire at the time. "Airria" (Hanging Garden) (2003): Arnold Schönberg's work The Book Of Hanging Gardens haunts the piece, and is used as a backbone over which a ghostly and exhilarating vocal hovers. Both unsettling and relaxing, this track from the Speak No More About The Leaves CD has strangely become a mini phenomenon on YouTube with its number of views and comments. "Vein" (1996): A few seconds taken from a Ralf Wehowsky piece are shaped into a nocturnal raga imbued with substances of an indeterminate nature. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Cut by Fred Alstadt at Studio Angström.
Steve Roden is a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles, living in Pasadena. His work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, text and performance. In the sound works, singular source materials such as objects, architectural spaces, and field recordings, are abstracted through humble electronic processes to create new audio spaces, or possible landscapes. The sound works present themselves with an aesthetic Roden has described as lower case -- sound concerned with subtlety and the quiet activity of listening.
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LP
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SONORIS 005LP
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LP version. Sonoris announce the release of some important works from the influential and respected artist Steve Roden. These tracks, which mix conceptual composition and musicality, transcend the ambient or lowercase categories too quickly applied to his music, due to its ghostly beauty. In the tradition of John Cage's Cartridge music amplified objects, Steve Roden extracts a fine and delicate music through his manipulation of specific objects, with an apparent simplicity that hides a captivating magic. Whilst reinventing a form of ambient music which is discreet and atmospheric, Steve Roden delivers sound textures, gives shape to color swatches, traces vibrant frequencies and creates visual art objects. Roden, both a visual and a sound artist often tagged as minimal for want of a better description, builds the sound design of a life, a new construction for the future which encompasses architecture, visual arts, and painting in a single form. "The Radio" (1996): The sound sources are derived from the object itself -- the airwaves as well as the internal mechanics (aerial, springs, knobs). Originally released as a mini-CD by Sonoris, this work centered on Roden's voice and found sound loops is now unexpectedly considered a classic and was seen as "a particularly modest form of genius" in a review by The Wire at the time. "Airria" (Hanging Garden) (2003): Arnold Schönberg's work The Book Of Hanging Gardens haunts the piece, and is used as a backbone over which a ghostly and exhilarating vocal hovers. Both unsettling and relaxing, this track from the Speak No More About The Leaves CD has strangely become a mini phenomenon on YouTube with its number of views and comments. "Vein" (1996): A few seconds taken from a Ralf Wehowsky piece are shaped into a nocturnal raga imbued with substances of an indeterminate nature. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Cut by Fred Alstadt at Studio Angström.
Steve Roden is a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles, living in Pasadena. His work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, text and performance. In the sound works, singular source materials such as objects, architectural spaces, and field recordings, are abstracted through humble electronic processes to create new audio spaces, or possible landscapes. The sound works present themselves with an aesthetic Roden has described as lower case -- sound concerned with subtlety and the quiet activity of listening.
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CD
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LINE 052CD
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"Proximities was recorded in 2010 during my time as the artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. I began by recording a performance of a series of tones played on an old battery powered Paia Oz, that were determined by the letters A-G as found in a text by minimalist sculptor Donald Judd. I recorded the tone sequence several times during sunrise, amidst fifty of Judd's stainless steel sculptures in an old army barracks that has been converted into a museum. The performances were recorded with an H4 digital recorder, my iPhone and also a cheap Sony micro-cassette recorder. During several of the performances these small devices were emitting the sounds of previous performances from their tiny speakers. At times I also hummed. All of the processing in the recordings was generated by the extremely resonant physical space. The occasional popping sound, which can be heard at the end, are the sounds of Judd's sculpture expanding while the sunrise changed the temperature within the space." --Steve Roden
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2CD/BOOK
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DTD 020CD
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2021 restock. Subtitled: Music In Vernacular Photographs, 1880-1955. I Listen To The Wind That Obliterates My Traces brings together a collection of early photographs related to music, a group of 78rpm recordings, and short excerpts from various literary sources that are contemporary with the sound and images. It is a somewhat intuitive gathering, culled from artist Steve Roden's collection of thousands of vernacular photographs related to music, sound, and listening. The subjects range from the PT Barnum-esque Professor McRea -- "Ontario's Musical Wonder" (pictured with his complex sculptural one-man band contraption) -- to anonymous African-American guitar players and images of early phonographs. The images range from professional portraits to ethereal, accidental, double exposures -- and include a range of photographic print processes, such as tintypes, ambrotypes, CDVS, cabinet cards, real photo postcards, albumen prints, and turn-of-the-century snapshots. The two CDs bring together a variety of recordings, including one-off amateur recordings, regular commercial releases, and early sound effects records. There is no narrative structure to the book, but the collision of literary quotes (Hamsun, Lagarkvist, Wordsworth, Nabokov, etc.). Recordings and images conspire towards a consistent mood that is anchored by the book's title, which binds such disparate things as an early recording of an American cowboy ballad, a poem by a Swedish Nobel Laureate, a recording of crickets created artificially, and an image of an itinerant anonymous woman sitting in a field, playing a guitar. The book also contains an essay by Roden. Hardback book, 8.5 x 6.5 inches, 184 pages, 150 photographs reproduced in full color and two audio CDs from the author's collection.
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