Artist: Steve Roden
Title: trio (wonderful) | ©
Date: 2009
Duration: 5′35
photo by: Steve Roden
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THE SOUND
The piece began with two field recordings made in new york city in march of 2009. The first was recorded through an open window of my hotel room, and consists of a distant woman singing. The only word in her song I can recognize is “wonderful”. The second is a recording I made while walking across union square, listening to a guy playing a rock style drum kit, solo, on a small concrete island surrounded by people talking and cars whizzing by. Both were recorded with my phone. Most of the field recordings I make are of natural sounds or mechanical sounds – things that drone or repeat and are somewhat non-narrative, and more like fields of sound: rain, a freezer motor, someone raking leaves. It is rare that I record humans making music, and perhaps that is why these two recordings suggested they be placed together. I merged the woman singer with the drummer towards a “song”, and inserted myself as the third member of their “band”. I manipulated their recordings, played a bit of melody on a small paia oz battery powered synthesizer, and I sang a tiny bit of background vocals. The rhythmic drumbeat and the amount of movement in this piece are not really indicative of most of my work, which tends to be quiet and less active, but I was interested in allowing the source materials to suggest a path that I might not have discovered without them.
THE ARTIST
Steve Roden is a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles. Since the mid 1980s, he has been exhibiting his visual and sound works at museums, festivals, and arts spaces internationally, including: Mercosur Biennial Porto Alegre Brazil, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, UCLA Hammer Museum Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art EMST Athens, Singuhr-Horgalerie in Parochial, Berlin, Serpentine Gallery London, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, DCA Dundee Scotland, Susanne Vielmetter LA and Berlin Projects, and others. He has created site-specific sound works for numerous significant architectural spaces such as the James Turrell Skyspace at the Henry Art Gallery Seattle, the Frank Lloyd Wright Hollhock House Los Angeles, Alvaro Siza’s Serpentine Gallery Temporary Pavilion London, the RM Schindler House Los Angeles, and Thomas Walter’s 1835 building for Girard College Philadelphia. He has also released over 20 cds of audio works.
Links: www.inbetweennoise.com
