Steve Roden

Experimental artist Steve Roden pursued work across drawing, sculpture, film and video, sound installation, performance, and recording. He followed a method that converted particular notations—words, maps, and graphs—into musical scores, which then guided the making of paintings, drawings, sculptures, sonic compositions, and sound installations. Although fixed in form, the scores still permitted intuitive gestures, errors, and unforeseen shifts in direction. Roden’s sonic explorations helped establish the ambient subgenre lowercase music, an extreme minimalism that enlarges quiet, ordinarily unnoticed sounds into absorbing soundscapes. His 2001 release Forms of Paper is regarded as the first lowercase album. He worked with experimental artists and composers including Richard Chartier, Frank Bretschneider, and Machinefabriek. His pieces appeared in solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide, and he received numerous fellowships and grants.

Born in Los Angeles in 1964, Roden entered music unexpectedly as a punk rocker fronting Seditionaries from 1979 to 1982. He earned a B.F.A. from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in 1986 and an M.F.A. from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1989. By then he had begun issuing experimental recordings as In Be Tween Noise. New Plastic Music released his debut album, So Delicate and Strangely Made, in 1993, followed by Humming Endlessly in the Thrush in 1995. Later titles such as 1997’s Translations & Articulations appeared under his own name. That same year also saw Crop Circles, which incorporated sounds gathered in Joshua Tree, California. By the end of the decade Roden had switched from micro-cassettes to contact microphones.

After 2000’s Four Possible Landscapes, the Hollywood branch of the Los Angeles Public Library commissioned an installation work. He produced an album using only the sounds of paper being handled; issued by Richard Chartier’s Line in 2001, Forms of Paper came to be recognized as the first lowercase album. The following year he collaborated with Chartier and Bernhard Günter on (For Morton Feldman) and with Francisco López on Le Chemin du Paradis. In 2003 Sirr released the acclaimed Speak No More About the Leaves, built from his own voice. He returned to Line with 2005’s Airforms and issued the 2007 split Cosmic Debris with My Cat Is an Alien.

Dust-to-Digital released I Listen to the Wind That Obliterates My Traces in 2011, pairing early music-related photographs with 78-rpm recordings and brief excerpts from period literary sources. Roden curated the set from his personal archive of thousands of vernacular photographs connected to music and sound, as well as listening itself. Another Line title, Proximities, appeared that year after being recorded during a residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

The year 2012 brought joint projects with Steve Peters (Not a Leaf Remains as It Was) and Machinefabriek (Lichtung). Dragon’s Eye issued Flower & Water in 2014, constructed entirely from the label’s first release, a George Winston flexi-disc. Also that year Roden released Suite Nuit with Frank Bretschneider and The Spaces Contained in Each with Stephen Vitiello. Small Songs for Kack Jirby, a double LP of modular synthesizer improvisations, and the CD Striations both appeared in 2016. In addition the French label Sonoris released Every Color Moving (1988-2003), a six-CD box set of early rarities from his period as In Be Tween Noise. The following year the label issued A Thousand Breathing Forms, another box set containing rare and unreleased material recorded between 2003 and 2008. Roden was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease in 2017. He died on September 6, 2023.