STEVE RODEN

six sound installations

OUT OCTOBER 10 on all digital platforms

LINE is proud to issue this collection documenting six installation works by artist Steve Roden (1964-2023). These delicate sound pieces encompass a range of Roden’s approaches to creating sound and his unique coded visual scoring.

LINE, working with Sari Roden, Stephen Vitiello, Michael Raphael, and Steve Roden Studio, has assembled these for distribution on all digital platforms so that more listeners may hear them and once again be immersed in his extraordinary lowercase worlds.

Over 3.5 hours in length and all lovingly remastered by Taylor Deupree.

Steve Roden was formative in the creation of LINE through his inspiration, innovation, energy, and friendship. It is a honor to have these works on LINE.

READ: ‘Steve Roden, An Archive, An Unreliable Narrat or’ by Stephen Vitieillo ( On Mind / Sept 10, 2025 )

Bandcamp Apple Music TIDAL Reviews

Catalog:: LINE_168

Format:: digital

Edition:: open edition

Release:: October 2025

Tracklist:

1. reading/without / reading/within (1999) (13:29)
2. first bird form (2001) (58:57)
3. music for clouds (2002) (51:14)
4. usonian poem (2004) (21:30)
5. night ring (2006) (63:22)
6. when stars become words (2007) (10:14)

Special thanks to LINE for issuing six sound installations. I’m grateful to Richard for giving them this opportunity to reach a wider audience since sound installations are ephemeral. This release is especially timely for me as this September 6th marks the second anniversary of Steve’s passing… Sankaiki in Japanese culture. —Sari, 2025

remastered in 2025 by Taylor Deupree at 12k Mastering
original photography / art by Steve Roden
design by Richard Chartier

play at low volume

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reading/without / reading/within (1999)
pencil on paper wrapped over wood blocks, sound composition, audio gear

Podewil / Berlin, Germany / 1999
the guardshack / Bergamot Station / Santa Monica, CA / 2000

the piece was inspired by hearing a recording of James Joyce reading/speaking a fragment of Finnegan’s Wake. the sound was composed using fragments of Joyce’s voice that were edited, looped and electronically transformed (via guitar pedals and other analog electronics). while the soundscape was made up of audible words, the processing allowed the words to disintegrate into a kind of pure sound or sound beyond words (and voice). the idea was to imbue an already difficult to understand text to unfold into pure abstraction.

the drawings were also made in relation to Finnegan’s Wake, generally conversing with a specific characteristic of a page in an attempt to make a drawing for every page of the book (which i did not complete). basically a drawing would be made based on an agreement with a page—such as drawing circles on the paper in relation to the placement of every letter “O” was found on the page, or tracing the shapes of the paragraphs, or reading a page out loud while making a continuous mark/line on the paper.

it was an early approach to working with texts as scores, and trying to allow a source to ignite a kind of rigorous play (which seemed quite relevant to the text…)

“while Joyce’s voice is the prominent voice, there is also some guitar, pedals, and electronics. the idea was to work with the voice until it broke down (going from audible words to noise). this was an early attempt to work with sound and words.”
— Steve Roden

MORE INFO / IMAGES

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first bird form (2001)
40 speaker installation with sound

Snapshot: New Art from Los Angeles / UCLA Hammer Museum / Los Angeles, CA / 2001
Miami Museum of Contemporary Art / Miami, Florida / 2001

the piece was initially inspired by the trees in the center courtyard of the Hammer Museum, and i wanted to create a piece for the trees that had a similar presence to birds landing and wandering around all the branches. the installation involved 8 tracks of audio spread out over 40 small speakers placed on various branches. the source materials were acoustic recordings of dried leaves and twigs, as well as some early 78 rpm recordings of bird songs. all sounds were manipulated and transformed electronically via analog guitar pedals and electronics. the piece was intended to converse with the somewhat fractured nature of the trees in the middle of a very unnatural landscape. these images are from this initial installation at the hammer, and in miami the piece was installed in front of the museum, along a long concrete walkway, suggestive of audio ghosts of the original landscape.

“i sited my piece around a large atrium, with the hope that the electronic birds and the living birds will become friends”
— Steve Roden

MORE INFO / IMAGES

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music for clouds (2002)
stereo composition, speakers and electronics, plywood structure, handmade pillow

e/static gallery / Torino, Italy / 2002

i wanted to create a viewing space with sound for the movement of clouds as they moved through a very beautiful skylight in the gallery space. the installation consisted of an elevated platform with small speakers. the idea was that one could lay down on the platform and watch the clouds move, while listening to the sound.

the audio was created using a score process i had been working for several years using the term ‘cloud formations’ to determine notes based on the contours drawn by copying the cloud’s shapes. it was a simple way of determining pitches based on the up and down contours. this idea began mainly as a path of singing notes moving up and down and trying to use form to determine “moves”. in this case i transformed the drawing of a cloud to the neck of an electric guitar and recorded various notes that followed the cloud path image. the work was played very softly through two speakers facing each other so that was only audible when one was laying down on the platform facing the skylight, head between the little speakers.

“this piece was certainly influenced inspired by eno’s ‘ambient’ and ‘generative’ recordings.”
—Steve Roden

MORE INFO / IMAGES

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usonian poem (2004)
stereo sound installation

Frank Lloyd Wrights’s Hollyhock House / Barnsdall Art Park / Los Angeles, CA
commissioned for the event ‘Pleasure Garden’

my decision to work with Wright’s Hollyhock House began a few months earlier, in Japan. i visited a house designed by Wright in Kobe, and while exploring one of the terraces an acorn fell on my head. i picked it up and put it in my pocket.

when i was invited to create an installation for the event, i not only wanted to create a work in conversation with the Hollyhock House, but to bring my recent experience with Wright’s work in Japan into the conversation.

when people speak of site specificity, in relation to sound, it is usually a somewhat straightforward connection between site and sound. for myself, i tend to shy away from clear or overly logical decisions, thus, there is always room for intuitive decisions that might not add up intellectually, but offer a feeling of trust in terms of “rightness”.

thus i composed the soundscape using a series of processed recordings of the kobe acorn falling onto the strings of my lap steel guitar—so that the recordings played in front of the house in hollywood would be sonically touched by the sound of an object from a space in Japan that Wright had visited. formally, the soundscape was emanating from two speakers at opposite ends of a covered walkway, creating a sonic atmosphere for the space.

while the first iteration of the piece was wholly focused on the two Wright locations, the second version, which was created for e/static gallery in Torino, Italy, included other elements and ideas—mainly the inclusion of language (visible on the walls), and ideas related to translation.

having trouble sleeping because of jetlag, i spent much of my first evening in Torino translating the names of Torino streets into english. since i don’t speak italian, i could only read the italian words out loud and then would come up with corollary word in english – so that Torino was transformed into “to rain on”… the entire list of words was penciled on the wall of the gallery, so that the sound piece and the writing/drawing became a kind of mash-up, where disparate things are pressed together, so that they begin to function more like a tug of war than an embrace.

of course, the making of the pieces and the ideas behind them followed a ridiculously idiosyncratic path moving locationally (from Japan to Los Angeles to Italy and finally to Pennsylvania); moving linguistically (by connecting words in different languages—and knowing one and not knowing the other); blending architecture, sound and words into a single work (embracing the hybrid, the cluster, the constellation and the mess); and jettisoning logic towards intuitive connections (without questioning whether or not anyone can unpack the ideas.)

through this alchemical combination of trust and wonder the translation of the word ‘torino’ went through various permutations, moving from Torino, to ‘to rain on’ to ‘falling water’ as if i’d always known that an acorn from Frank Lloyd Wright in Japan would lead me through language, drawing and sound towards a final place known as ‘falling water’, which would bring Wright, and me, back to the beginning…

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night ring (2006)
field recordings, tuning forks, violin (played by Jacob Danziger), tapping of benches. 5.1 speaker system.

Henry Museum / Seattle, WA / 2006

night ring was one of a two part sound installation including day ring for the Henry Museum’s James Turrell Skyspace Light Reign. This is the companion sound piece that played from dusk to dawn, discreetly drifting softly from the Skyspace.

“more than simply adding something to the space, i wanted to converse with it, and to possibly shift its use but also while allowing all of its own integrity to remain intact… overwhelmed with the situation, and struggling with an approach that would appeal to the site and my own practice, i happened upon a set of tuning forks—each one supposedly tuned to the orbit of a planet (yes, pluto was still a planet then!). i liked very much the idea of a viewer/listener looking up at the sky and listening – and all the time unknowingly that they were listening to a sound map of planetary orbits. i brought the tuning forks to musician jacob danziger and asked him to improvise with each of the resonant tones of each tuning fork. i then combined the sounds of the tuning forks, the violin, and the field recordings—some left as is, and some processed—to build the sound pieces.”
—Steve Roden

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when stars become words (2007)
guitar, harmonica, processing

Mercosur Biennial / Porto Allegre, Brazil / 2007

commissioned for the Mercosur Biennial, the piece consisted of two large sculptural structures with sound. the structures as well as the sound compositions were built through various translation systems related to a list of 50 star names published by the Adler Planetarium of Chicago in the early 1940’s.

i used the vowels of the star names to generate a series of parts that were pieced together to create the larger forms—13 towards the smaller structure, and 37 towards the larger. the painted areas were also also determined by the vowels in conjunction with Arthur Rimbaud’s color vowel equivalents. the sound compositions were created from scores using the visual forms of various southern hemisphere constellations that included the same 50 stars.

while there is a level of pre-determined rigidity to the scoring process, the building and composing was actually quite intuitive, the pre-determined and the intuited conversing at all times.

the entire score consisted of 12 drawings made with pencil, watercolor and collage on found musical notation paper. the images are based on maps of constellations from the southern hemisphere that include stars whose names were used to generate the sculptural forms.

scores were placed beneath the strings of an old zither, so that the constellation determined the strings to be plucked. harmonica drones were recorded into pro-tools and the soundwaves were then organized on the screen visually to replicate the constellation form, leading to chance interactions between drones in terms of time lengths and pitch.

this version was done with a guitar, while a second version used a piano, and a third, a hamonium.
originally recorded in mono, and converted to stereo.

MORE INFO / IMAGES 1
MORE INFO / IMAGES 2

STEVE RODEN (1964-2023)

Steve centered his life upon the making of connections and meaning by experimenting with visual imagery, music, language, code, translation, listening, and the amassing of various collections of objects and ephemera. In a KCET Artbound interview with Sharon Mizota from 2012, he shared, “It’s a very personal way of moving through the world to connect things that really weren’t meant to be connected.” Steve built his life in much the same way as he constructed his visual musical scores or his paintings, drawings, collages, sound installations, and films. He thoughtfully translated his intimate observations of the “unnoticed” things in his environment or another artist, writer, philosopher, architect, or musician’s work and made something new-always bringing the past forward, personalizing his conversation with the material, and churning it into a poetic and relevant aesthetic experience for the present. In a recent email exchange with Fulcrum Arts Executive Director Robert Crouch, he shared “Steve could create a simple set of rules, inspired by the most humble and mundane materials, and through his process, create and share something utterly gorgeous, unique, and transcendent.”

Since 1986, Steve consistently exhibited and performed his work in the United States and abroad. His artwork is held in many public and private collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and San Diego, and National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece. Steve was featured in the Hammer Museum’s landmark exhibition “SNAPSHOT: New Art From Los Angeles” in 2001. In 2003, he had his first solo exhibition with his LA gallerist Susanne Vielmetter at her first location on Wilshire Boulevard. Vielmetter plans to present an exhibition of his work in fall 2024. In 2010, the Armory Center for the Arts organized “in between: a 20- year survey” and Pomona College Museum of Art simultaneously mounted “when words become forms.” In his review of these projects, Los Angeles Times Art Critic Christopher Knight wrote, “Looking at a Roden painting, sculpture or projected film, you sense this interaction of formal system and cryptic intuition,” and he likened Steve’s art to the work of Paul Klee, Alfred Jensen, and Arthur Dove.

Throughout his life as Steve’s musical interests expanded from punk and post-punk to electronic, minimalist, and beyond, the artist tuned his attention to listening. Inspired by experimental sound artists and composers like Brian Eno, Meredith Monk, Rolf Julius, and Morton Feldman, Steve developed his own style of music and performing known as “lowercase.” Steve’s vast and impressive discography and landmark releases include “forms and paper” (2001, 2011 Line, and on vinyl 2024 Aurora Central Records); “i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces” (2011, Dust to Digital); and “Oionos” (2022, Room 40), a track originally created for the exhibition “The Grand Promenade” (2006), Athens, Greece. Musician, friend, and producer Lawrence English expressed, “In this world there are some artists who listen so very deeply, who cherish the minor, the incidental, the unexpected, the hushed; Steve was one such artist.” English elaborates, “Not only did Steve cast his ears outward, with a generosity equaled only by his curiosity, but he asked us to do the same. Together, we leaned into a world of sound so rich that we might not believe it could be possible. Steve not only guided us to and through that world, but he created it.”

Traveling the world to perform in sound art festivals and exhibit at museums and kunsthalles, Steve met and collaborated with many like-minded contemporaries including Steve Peters, Doug Aiken, Stas Orlovski, Michael Ned Holte, Michael Raphael, Alexandra Grant, Simone Forti, John David O’Brien, Toti Mercadante, Alison O’Daniel, Jeffrey Roden, and others. Visual and sound artist Stephen Vitiello, who performed with Steve in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, and in a Donald Judd desert installation for the “Marfa Sessions” exhibition (2008), recalls a recent and personal moment, “What I’ll remember for the rest of my life is my last visit with Steve. He was deep into the illness, and he seemed to have stopped making music and logic was slipping. He wanted me to see his father’s guitar. We spontaneously started to jam and played for a whole hour. His guitar was out of tune, but he was actively listening and responding. He managed to retain his singular sound and make something strangely beautiful and deep.”

Having a penchant for archives, ephemera, and the work of deceased 19th and 20th century artists, poets, and philosophers, Steve dug through notes, old letters, catalogs, manuscripts, and sketchbooks to look for ways to have an aesthetic conversation with the likes of Walter Benjamin, John Cage, Par Lagerkvist, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Harry Bertoia. In 2008, curator and former LACE director, Carol Stakenas, collaborated with Steve and the Getty Research Institute in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles on a re-invention of Allan Kaprow’s seminal “18 Happenings in 6 Parts,” originally presented in 1959 at the Reuben Gallery in New York. Stakenas had this to say, “What made working with Steve on 18/6 remarkable was how it brought us into the generative/creative space . . . full of improvisation, curiosity, and presence. Regularly, I re-read the letter he wrote for the event program ‘dear mr. kaprow (an approach to 18 happenings in 6 parts).’ Now, when I read the text, this line of Steve’s stands out. . . ‘i think your work suggests that struggle only gets you to the starting point, while an open mind is needed to truly embark upon the journey.'”

Steve Roden leaves behind a prolific and profound body of work. In the 2012 Artbound segment he speaks about the making of art as a learning process and the only way to do it is by experimentation and failure. He also says, “. . . painting is like the sun and all of the other media hover around it.” Glenn R. Phillips, Senior Curator at the Getty Research Institute, has commented, “Steve Roden had that wide-ranging curiosity and joy in experimentation that all great artists have. At the heart of his work is an incredible sense of play that can delight in taking an idea from the mind to the page, to the canvas, into sound, into space, and then back to the mind again. He understood the beauty of slowing down and allowing an experience to fully work its way through the body and the self.”

inbetweennoise.com

REVIEWS OF
six sound installations

There are artists who build monuments, and there are artists who carve doors. Steve Roden spent his life cutting quiet openings into the fabric of perception, inviting listeners to step sideways into a universe where the faintest rustle carries the weight of a revelation. His passing in 2023 gave his work an unintentional frame, but “six sound installations”—assembled with care, love, and a sense of responsibility by those closest to him—does something better than framing: it reanimates the rooms he once taught to hum.

Across more than three and a half hours, the collection gathers six installation pieces (plus two excerpts), each born in a different space, each listening to the architecture as much as producing any sound of its own. Roden’s hallmark “lowercase” sensibility is here, yes, but it’s not the academic lowercase of manifesto. It’s the lowercase of someone who believed the tiny things around us are already singing if only we’d turn our heads slightly.

This collection is a catalogue of transformations: voices dissolving into grain, leaves becoming spectral choirs, constellations mutating into chordal sketches, an acorn turning into a time-traveling collaborator. Roden’s practice was built on these odd, luminous leaps—the kind a child might attempt with absolute seriousness. And in this case, the child grew into a composer, painter, archivist, accidental mystic, and amateur linguist who translated spaces the way others translate poems.

reading/without / reading/within (1999)
A Joycean fever dream in miniature. Roden takes James Joyce’s voice – already a labyrinth – and gently unthreads it until the words melt into textural vapour. The piece feels like listening through fog: you can sense the presence of meaning, but it refuses to sit still. It’s a quiet rebellion against the tyranny of “making sense”, and a nod to Roden’s early fascination with using texts as scores, puzzles, and provocations.

first bird form (2001)
Forty small speakers, dried leaves, and manipulated antique bird recordings: Roden turns a museum courtyard into an aviary haunted by its own memories. There’s a grace to the way these sounds perch and scatter, like shy visitors who never quite land. Impossibly delicate for a piece with such scale, it tracks the invisible threads between the organic and the synthetic without privileging either.

music for clouds (2002)
Perhaps Roden’s most straightforwardly beautiful work here. A platform beneath a skylight, two whispering speakers, and a score derived from the contours of drifting clouds. The result is a piece that seems to exhale: slow, aerial, contemplative. It’s hard not to imagine Roden smiling while translating cloud shapes into guitar tones, as though the sky itself had handed him a set of half-finished melodies.

usonian poem (2004)
Frank Lloyd Wright, an acorn dropped in Japan, and the peculiar logic that only Roden could follow. This is a work stitched together from architectural intuition, linguistic play, and the serendipity of an object falling exactly where it shouldn’t. The soundscape feels like a correspondence between distant places—a kind of sonic pen-pal relationship—and it carries that warm, slightly amused tone of someone who knows that not all connections should be rational.

night ring (2006)
An installation for a Turrell Skyspace, blooming between dusk and dawn. Here Roden plays with planetary tuning forks, violin, and field recordings, building a subtle gravitational system of tones that gently pull you into orbit. It’s a piece that seems to hover at the boundary between music and ritual. One imagines insomniacs sitting beneath the Skyspace, convinced the stars have begun to whisper.

when stars become words (2007)
A cosmic translation engine: star names become vowels, vowels become sculptures, constellations become scores, scores become plucked strings and drifting drones. Roden treats astronomy as if it were a form of handwriting, tracing the sky’s calligraphy with patient delight. It’s the album’s most luminous moment, full of quiet wonder and the kind of intuition that refuses to announce itself.

What “six sound installations” ultimately reveals is not just Roden’s craft, but his worldview. He moved through life as though the world were full of half-hidden messages waiting to be coaxed into audibility. His installations were never demonstrations; they were invitations to recalibrate your senses. To lean closer. To notice the small tremors that usually vanish beneath the day’s noise.

Listening to this collection feels like reopening the notebooks of an artist who believed that anything—a word, a twig, a street name, a planetary orbit—could be the seed of a composition if approached with curiosity rather than mastery. The remastering allows these works to breathe again, not as museum artifacts, but as living thought-forms.

There’s a touch of melancholy, of course. How could there not be? But Roden’s work has always tended toward the luminous. Even in its quietest corners, it insists that attention is a form of love.

And across these hours of sound, that love radiates gently, insistently, like a small lamp refusing to go out.
—chaindlk.com

STEVE RODEN

Tracklist:

REVIEWS OF six sound installations

REVIEWS OF
six sound installations