Sonoris releases both on vinyl and CD, with a new mastering by
Giuseppe Ielasi, 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.
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 miniCD 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 stem is calm (1996): A few seconds taken from a Ralf Wehowsky piece are shaped into a nocturnal raga imbued with substances of an indeterminate nature.
Steve Roden (1964-2023) was a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles, living in Pasadena. His work has included painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, text and performance.
Roden's working process used various forms of specific notation (words, musical scores, maps, etc.) and translated them through self invented systems into scores, which then influenced the process of painting, drawing, sculpture, and composition. These scores, rigid in terms of their parameters and rules, are also full of holes for intuitive decisions, failures and left turns. The inspirational source material became a kind of formal skeleton that the abstract finished works was built upon.
In the visual works, translations of information such as text and maps, became rules and systems for generating visual actions such as color choices, number of elements, amounts of time and form building.
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.
