steve roden
forms of paper, 2001


forms of paper

label: line
cd in printed folder in vinyl sleeve / edition: 500 (sold out)

1. forms of paper, 54:01

an audio document of an installation for the los angeles public library created using electronically transformed sounds of turning book pages.
click here to see a document of the original installation.

REVIEWS:
los angeles artist steve roden often reconfigures physical objects and spaces in his recordings and installations, in pursuit of 'possible landscapes'. that is, by abstracting objects, architectures and field recordings through electronics, he creates new audio spaces. he refers to his microsonic aesthetic, which at times shares affinities with bernhard gunter's hushed work, as "lower case sound" or "sound concerned with the subtlety and the quiet activity of listening". fittingly, "forms of paper" is an expanded version of a recording initially designed for installation in the los angeles public library which dealt with the materiality of the printed page. all of the sounds on "forms of paper" are derived from the turning and touching of book pages, but the way that they've been processed and reconfigured with protools strips out any obvious sonic hallmarks. what's left is a shifting constellation of crackles, rustles, and static, swirling together eddy upon eddy of clicks into a pouros drone. it's certainly not a vast imaginative leap to imagine these sounds as a sort of sonic metaphor for the surface of paper viewed under magnification, cratered with the natural grain of compressed pulp, littered with dust, and scraped with angled light. Indeed, the narrow scope of roden's conceit contributes the work's success. his philosophical interest is summed up in a quote from hiroshi ogawa: " when you hold a clean immaculate piece of paper, no matter what size it may be cut or folded into, you can find the meaning of its form there. it is clear that the surface of the sheet encloses infinite space." like the object that it takes as its point of departure, "forms of paper" unfolds from a nominally two dimensional plane into a space shot through with hidden depths and cavities, each one a wormhole leading to a realm as full of possibility as silence itself.
philip sherburne/ the wire
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Forms Of Paper demonstrates the expected but still surprising Roden-ly alchemical act of turning the unexpected into musical sonority (think chair, lamp etc). Originally composed for Six degrees: art in the libraries, an installation in the LA Public Library, it is created from the sounds of book pages being handled. Not that you could guess there are no passages where the page emerges unscathed. Originally a 10minute loop, the cd version has been expanded and re-worked. The soundpiece is a delicate shifting and layering of crackling taps (short&long) whip-snaps chitters rumbles hollow-scrapes frog-croaks that flow effortlessly around each other, pulsing and chattering, lightly shifting density, at a steady volume but very soft mix. It can (despite the instructions: in his note to me Steve said it should barely be there) be listened to as an active part of your surroundings, or as something that you listen through, almost ignoring, but adding its subtle colouration to your environment. This is Roden's first composition done entirely with a computer but sits perfectly with his earlier work, and has lost none of their delicacy. As with them, once you get over the source, the piece stands alone as a beautiful sensitive soundambience. I would love to see some of his installations.
jeremy/ ampersand etcetera

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