A selection of unreleased or hard-to-locate works from 2003 to 2008, a very prolific and creative period for the Californian artist.
The boxset is centered on his hard-to-describe loop based sound works that are uniquely his own, such as "Stars Of Ice" (2008), "A Christmas Play For Joseph Cornell" (2007), but also includes the conceptual "One Hour As The Bumps Of Surfaces" and some more musical or instrumental works. "So Delicate And Strangely Made", the title of one of his very first records (2003), could still be the right description of his sound work, rooted in visual arts and architecture, mixing conceptual rigor, and experimentation, without neglecting musicality.
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.
