STEVE RODEN

Forms of Paper (2024 remaster)

OUT ON JANUARY 31, 2025 on all digital platforms

Aurora Central Records (Mexico) in conjunction with LINE announce the first time editions on vinyl and cassette of the important 2001 lowercase work Forms of Paper by Steve Roden (1964-2023).

This project, initiated by Aurora Central Records, was supervised under the guidance of his estate and the Steve Roden Studio. This new version has been lovingly remastered by Taylor Deupree in 2024 from the original recording. It is a testimony to the enduring legacy of this fascinating minimalist sound work.

In keeping with the wishes of the estate of Steve Roden, LINE will be digitally distributing this new version.

physical release via AURORA CENTRAL RECORDS:
VINYL (edition of 250 copies)
CASSETTE (edition of 100 w/exclusive B-side interview)

digital release via LINE’s Bandcamp

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“Like the object that it takes as its point of departure, ‘Forms of Paper’ unfolds from a nominally two dimensional plane into a space shot through with hidden depths and cavities, each one a wormhole leading to a realm as full of possibility as silence itself.”
—The Wire, UK

“Alluring…”
—Boomkat.com

–

Forms of Paper was created for the ‘Art in the Libraries Exhibition’ and installed in the Frank Gehry designed Hollywood Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library in August, 2001. With the quiet space of the library as a major consideration, and amplified at a very low volume level, the recording uses electronically manipulated sounds of book pages being rubbed, scraped, turned, crumpled and other distortions.

Forms of Paper was originally released on LINE (LINE_007) in October of 2001. and has since been noted as one of lowercase music’s most iconic works. This work and Steve hold a special place in our hearts.

“I imagine the work as something of a folded piece of white paper sculpture; where shadows, folds, and light enable one to see not only the white of the paper, but a full spectrum of grays as well.”
—Steve Roden

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Catalog:: LINE_158

Format:: digital

Edition:: open edition

Release:: January 2025

Tracklist:

1. Forms of Paper (48:07)
2. Forms of Paper (06:33) (excerpt)

mastered by Taylor Deupree at 12k Mastering.
produced by Stephen Vitiello, Michael Raphael, and Sari Roden.

cover artwork: ‘wandering no. 25’ by Steve Roden (colored pencil on school paper, 11 x 8.5 inches) from the series “wandering” (2000-2001) an intuitive attempt to create a visual translation of Herman Hesse’s book of notes and sketches also titled “Wandering” (1920).

physical layout design by Jose Moreno Rahn.
special thanks to Meg Linton and Aurora Central Records.

STEVE RODEN (1964-2023)

Steve centered his life upon the making of connections and meaning by experimenting with visual imagery, music, language, code, translation, listening, and the amassing of various collections of objects and ephemera. In a KCET Artbound interview with Sharon Mizota from 2012, he shared, “It’s a very personal way of moving through the world to connect things that really weren’t meant to be connected.” Steve built his life in much the same way as he constructed his visual musical scores or his paintings, drawings, collages, sound installations, and films. He thoughtfully translated his intimate observations of the “unnoticed” things in his environment or another artist, writer, philosopher, architect, or musician’s work and made something new-always bringing the past forward, personalizing his conversation with the material, and churning it into a poetic and relevant aesthetic experience for the present. In a recent email exchange with Fulcrum Arts Executive Director Robert Crouch, he shared “Steve could create a simple set of rules, inspired by the most humble and mundane materials, and through his process, create and share something utterly gorgeous, unique, and transcendent.”

Since 1986, Steve consistently exhibited and performed his work in the United States and abroad. His artwork is held in many public and private collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and San Diego, and National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece. Steve was featured in the Hammer Museum’s landmark exhibition “SNAPSHOT: New Art From Los Angeles” in 2001. In 2003, he had his first solo exhibition with his LA gallerist Susanne Vielmetter at her first location on Wilshire Boulevard. Vielmetter plans to present an exhibition of his work in fall 2024. In 2010, the Armory Center for the Arts organized “in between: a 20- year survey” and Pomona College Museum of Art simultaneously mounted “when words become forms.” In his review of these projects, Los Angeles Times Art Critic Christopher Knight wrote, “Looking at a Roden painting, sculpture or projected film, you sense this interaction of formal system and cryptic intuition,” and he likened Steve’s art to the work of Paul Klee, Alfred Jensen, and Arthur Dove.

Throughout his life as Steve’s musical interests expanded from punk and post-punk to electronic, minimalist, and beyond, the artist tuned his attention to listening. Inspired by experimental sound artists and composers like Brian Eno, Meredith Monk, Rolf Julius, and Morton Feldman, Steve developed his own style of music and performing known as “lowercase.” Steve’s vast and impressive discography and landmark releases include “forms and paper” (2001, 2011 Line, and on vinyl 2024 Aurora Central Records); “i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces” (2011, Dust to Digital); and “Oionos” (2022, Room 40), a track originally created for the exhibition “The Grand Promenade” (2006), Athens, Greece. Musician, friend, and producer Lawrence English expressed, “In this world there are some artists who listen so very deeply, who cherish the minor, the incidental, the unexpected, the hushed; Steve was one such artist.” English elaborates, “Not only did Steve cast his ears outward, with a generosity equaled only by his curiosity, but he asked us to do the same. Together, we leaned into a world of sound so rich that we might not believe it could be possible. Steve not only guided us to and through that world, but he created it.”

Traveling the world to perform in sound art festivals and exhibit at museums and kunsthalles, Steve met and collaborated with many like-minded contemporaries including Steve Peters, Doug Aiken, Stas Orlovski, Michael Ned Holte, Michael Raphael, Alexandra Grant, Simone Forti, John David O’Brien, Toti Mercadante, Alison O’Daniel, Jeffrey Roden, and others. Visual and sound artist Stephen Vitiello, who performed with Steve in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, and in a Donald Judd desert installation for the “Marfa Sessions” exhibition (2008), recalls a recent and personal moment, “What I’ll remember for the rest of my life is my last visit with Steve. He was deep into the illness, and he seemed to have stopped making music and logic was slipping. He wanted me to see his father’s guitar. We spontaneously started to jam and played for a whole hour. His guitar was out of tune, but he was actively listening and responding. He managed to retain his singular sound and make something strangely beautiful and deep.”

Having a penchant for archives, ephemera, and the work of deceased 19th and 20th century artists, poets, and philosophers, Steve dug through notes, old letters, catalogs, manuscripts, and sketchbooks to look for ways to have an aesthetic conversation with the likes of Walter Benjamin, John Cage, Par Lagerkvist, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Harry Bertoia. In 2008, curator and former LACE director, Carol Stakenas, collaborated with Steve and the Getty Research Institute in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles on a re-invention of Allan Kaprow’s seminal “18 Happenings in 6 Parts,” originally presented in 1959 at the Reuben Gallery in New York. Stakenas had this to say, “What made working with Steve on 18/6 remarkable was how it brought us into the generative/creative space . . . full of improvisation, curiosity, and presence. Regularly, I re-read the letter he wrote for the event program ‘dear mr. kaprow (an approach to 18 happenings in 6 parts).’ Now, when I read the text, this line of Steve’s stands out. . . ‘i think your work suggests that struggle only gets you to the starting point, while an open mind is needed to truly embark upon the journey.'”

Steve Roden leaves behind a prolific and profound body of work. In the 2012 Artbound segment he speaks about the making of art as a learning process and the only way to do it is by experimentation and failure. He also says, “. . . painting is like the sun and all of the other media hover around it.” Glenn R. Phillips, Senior Curator at the Getty Research Institute, has commented, “Steve Roden had that wide-ranging curiosity and joy in experimentation that all great artists have. At the heart of his work is an incredible sense of play that can delight in taking an idea from the mind to the page, to the canvas, into sound, into space, and then back to the mind again. He understood the beauty of slowing down and allowing an experience to fully work its way through the body and the self.”

inbetweennoise.com

REVIEWS OF
Forms of Paper (2024 remaster)

In 2023, the context of experiment music lost one of its great, quiet forces with the untimely passing of the Los Angeles based artist Steve Roden. One of the pioneers of Lowercase music, for more than 30 years Roden entirely changed our relationship to sound and the creative act via a prolific and endlessly engrossing and ambitious body of releases, as well as an expansive practice that also blurred the boundaries between music, painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, and performance. His absence has left a remarkable hole in our world. Keeping the fire alive and helping to make his contributions available to wider audiences, the fantastic Monterrey, Mexico, based imprint, Aurora Central, now returns off the back of some killer recent releases by Mabe Fratti, Merzbow, Concepción Huerta and Camilo Ángeles, Xiu Xiu, Gibrana Cervantes, and numerous others, delivering the first ever vinyl pressing of Roden’s seminal 2001 full length, Forms of Paper, bringing it back into print for the first time in more than two decades. An absolutely stunning, deeply intimate work, comprising constellations of microscopic sounds, even after all these years this deeply effecting work feels ahead of our time and brings Roden’s incredible contribution to experimental sound practice to the forefront of the consciousness once again. Issued in a beautifully produced, newly remastered vinyl edition of 250 copies, as well as on tape in a 100 copies limited edition which features an in-depth interview with the artist, this is unquestionably one of the most essential reissues of 2025 so far.

First emerging during the early 1990s, Steve Roden was a pioneer of Lowercase music, a movement that uses amplification as a means to address the subtle and overlooked sounds of objects and environments. Within a body of work that spans many dozens of albums – guided by rigorous conceptual perimeters and concerns – he continuously pushed forward over the course of more than three decades, harnessing the inherent value possessed by sonorous material generated by non-instrumental sources and everyday life, and illuminated the path for countless artists following in his wake. Offering monumental presence to the smallest moment and sound, his 2001 full length, Forms of Paper, can be regarded as a landmark in the idiom.

At the time of the appearance of “Forms of Paper”, its author had already been active on the scene for more than a decade, sculpting a deeply conceptual and rigorous body of work at the borders of sound art and experimental music, first appearing in 1990 on the cassette “The Secret of Happiness” before picking up momentum during the latter 1990s and early 2000s with “Crop Circles“, “Translations & Articulations”, “View”, and “Four Possible Landscapes”, all of which planted a deep impression within the percolating context of sound practice during that moment. “Forms of Paper” was his first release with Line, an imprint with which he would continue to work over the course of his life, which describes itself as a “programmatic sound platform with a strong inclination towards the visual arts and multimedia, born from the desire to take the tactile qualities of audio installations from the gallery space to listeners’ living rooms”: a perfect orientation toward where this album sits within the creative landscape…

Despite the clear and single source of auditory materiality of “Forms of Paper”, the work is about as far removed from the expected as could be, as Roden entirely transforms the locatability of his source material through unknown forms of processing. Unfurling as a glacially paced landscape of microscopic sounds and pointillistic detail, percolating, bubbling, rustling, and pulsing, continuously alluding, though its structures and interactions, to the natural world, despite the synthetic appearances of populating sounds.

A deeply intimate work occupied with a total sense of self and explored at the pace that Roden sets, “Forms of Paper” is a gesture of truly rare creative artistry that remains as radical and challenging nearly a two and half decades since it first entered the world: as humble and understated as it is staggering and earth shattering. This much needed, first ever vinyl pressing of this masterstroke of Lowercase music… It’s a marvel that we can’t possibly recommend enough and a lovely tribute to the life and legacy of Roden, one of the great artists of our time.
—soundohm.com
The Los Angeles artist and composer coaxed unexpected sounds from daily life. Newly remastered, his 2001 composition made from the sounds of books offers an intensely psychedelic listening experience.

The library is a place of quiet, they say—or whisper, anyway, the schoolmarmish cartoon librarian holding an insistent finger to furiously pursed lips. But beneath that caricature, a world of sound extends like tree roots just below the surface of perception: humming fluorescent lights and scraping chair legs, creaking radiators and footsteps on marble stairwells, clacking keyboards and retirees snoring in the periodicals section. Beneath it all, the books themselves, and their pages—grazed by fingertips, rustling as they turn, breezily falling together as the covers thwack shut.

In 2001, as part of a series called Six Degrees: Art in the Libraries, the Los Angeles multimedia artist and composer Steve Roden created an installation made entirely of the sounds of books and paper being touched and manipulated, which he then reworked digitally into an otherworldly stream of richly textured sound.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Roden was at the forefront of a loose movement dedicated to coaxing unexpected sounds out of everyday life by harnessing contact mics, electrical interference, and happenstance. His work was adjacent to a strain of digital minimalism known as microsound, but he preferred the term “lowercase,” which he described to The Wire in 1997: “small music that is humble, that allows the listener to discover it, to wander round in it.” In a world growing noisier by the day, he believed, “This is a more subtle and subversive way of getting people to pay attention.”

The piece was quintessentially Roden; he had built his entire art practice on the quotidian, the marginal, the ignored. Deeply invested in the possibilities of translation and mistranslation—not just between languages, but also between media or even senses of perception—Roden’s work frequently revolved around objects, interiors, and landscapes. The 1997 piece splint (the soul of wood) was made entirely out of the sounds of striking, bowing, and rubbing a 1943 plywood leg splint by Charles Eames; 1998’s lamp (within/without the skin) took a similar approach to a 1952 bubble lamp by designer George Nelson. Not all his readymades came with fancy pedigrees: 2002’s winter couplet was sourced from two teacups and played back through speakers connected through cardboard tubes, while 2006’s oionos, an installation for a rustic Athens church restored by the architect Dimitris Pikionis, incorporated tin whistles and toy harmonicas.

Many of Roden’s pieces, Forms of Paper included, have a kind of meta sensibility: For 1999’s View, he created a gallery installation out of sounds sourced from the ledge of the gallery window, a sonic equivalent to the room-sized pinhole camera. But the principal throughline in his work is its abiding quiet—combined, perhaps, with the idea that deep inside all that hushed rustling, an indecipherable language is trying to make itself heard. That’s certainly the case with Forms of Paper, which betrays little hint of its tactile source material; its liquid burbling and keening resonance sound more like an amplified underwater soundscape, a cryptic field of ocean currents and dolphin cries, swarming krill and hermit crabs scuttling along the seafloor.

The 10-minute piece looped for a month at low volume in the atrium of the Frank Gehry-designed Frances Howard Goldwyn Hollywood Regional Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, from speakers resting on pages taken from a discarded science text. The volume was quiet enough, he later explained, that the audio never reached the upstairs reading room; the sound remained clandestine, subliminal, a hidden feature of the building. It was, nonetheless, an audacious choice of sound art for a public institution, and one anonymous visitor hid a small electronic toy emitting cricket sounds in a nearby bookcase—whether as a critique, one-upmanship, or an attempt at a virtual duet, it’s impossible to say.

Reworked into an hour-long composition, Forms of Paper was first released in 2001, although Roden later expressed frustration with the mastering: “The disc sounded relatively ok at a very very low volume,” he wrote, “but if anyone listened to it at a normal listening volume or on headphones, it wasn’t the piece I’d intended at all.” His friend Bernhard Günter, of the Trente Oiseaux label, remastered the record’s first reissue, in 2011; it’s been remastered again by Taylor Deupree for this new reissue (which includes its first vinyl edition). Without immediate access to the two previous editions, I can’t compare their nuances, but this version demands a sort of sweet spot on the volume dial—loud enough to appreciate the detail, but not too loud, because certain resonant frequencies become almost uncomfortable if overamplified.

For all the record’s humble origins, Forms of Paper can be an intensely psychedelic listening experience, conjuring a dynamic matrix of footsteps, purring cats, whirly tubes, and shortwave transmissions. Not nearly as tranquil as you might expect, it’s full of erratic movements, insect-like skittering, and unexpected shifts in volume. The lack of obvious progression or development contributes to the unsettling air; you don’t so much move purposefully through the piece as drift without aim, propelled by unpredictable gusts. The album hovers eerily somewhere between Chris Watson and Philip Jeck—it might be a transmission from a fragile and indecipherable alternate dimension swarming with ghosts.

Roden died in September 2023, just 59 years old, six years after he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. At the risk of sentimentalizing his death, the disease throws Forms of Paper in a poignant new light. To revisit Roden’s work is to be reminded not just of its formal vision, but also its unusual thoughtfulness. I find some small solace in the fact that a part of Roden lives on in Forms of Paper, a tribute to books: the best technology for preserving memory—and, by extension, immortality—that humans have yet devised.
—Philip Sherburne, pitchfork.com

STEVE RODEN

Tracklist:

REVIEWS OF Forms of Paper (2024 remaster)

REVIEWS OF
Forms of Paper (2024 remaster)