The first-ever release on vinyl of the important 2001 lowercase work "Forms of Paper" by Steve Roden. Lovingly remastered by
Taylor Deupree of 12K Masters in 2024 from the original recording, this limited-edition LP features Steve Roden's artwork on the cover/packaging.
"Forms of Paper" was originally created by Steve Roden for the art exhibition "Six-Degrees: Art in the Libraries" organized by Side Street Projects in 2001. The exhibition took place in the Hollywood branch of the Los Angeles Public Library designed by Frank Gehry. The work was created with the quiet space of the library as a major consideration, amplified at a very low volume. All the sounds in the composition are made by book pages being handled and turned. "Forms of Paper" was originally released by LINE on CD in 2001 and reissued digitally in 2011.
This project, initiated by Aurora Central Records, was supervised under the guidance of his estate and the Steve Roden Studio.
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.
