steve roden
light forms , 2003


light forms (music for lightbulbs and churches)

label: semishigure/bottrop-boy
cd in jewel box with color booklet / edition: 500

1. truth is the bell (saarbrucken) 16:13
2. bell is the truth (berlin) 20:10

both tracks use the electronically transformed sounds of lightbulbs being handled and were inspired by the bell ringing scores of jasper snowdon, the theme of 'light' for a performance evening at the stadtgalerie saarbrucken, and the singuhr - hoergalerie in parocial exhibition space (a church) in berlin. track 1 is a studio version of the concert piece for saarbrucken, and track two is the soundtrack for the berlin installation.
click here to see documentation of the original berlin installation

REVIEWS:
Semishigure is the smallest label in the Bottrop-Boy imperium (next to En-Of) and deals with music and art, or art and music. The music can be soundtracks to films (Liam Gillicks CD) or installation music (Christina Kubisch CD). The third and most recent CD is by Steve Roden and is music from an installation he did in Berlin and a concert in Saarbrucken. For the Berlin installation he uses the sounds of lightbulb as a soundtrack to a super 8 film. Similar sound sources are used in the Saarbrucken concert, but here it's a studio version of that concert (which involved random, blindfold mixing). Both of these pieces have the subtle rumbling of a couple of lightbulbs in both hands. The recordings are put in some multi-track programming and mixed. A small part is looped for a couple of times. Some parts are reversed. But mainly: that's it. But all of these simple things lead to a beautiful work - ambient, musical, maybe even a bit glitch like. Since Roden's recent work on Sonoris (see Vital Weekly 363), I found his work to become more and more musical and this is continued on this new CD. His older works are now, in hindsight, more static, more ambient, and now a musical element has come in, and his work matured overal. Another fine work.
(Frans de Waard) VITAL #389

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