Steve Roden, An Archive, An Unreliable Narrator by Stephen Vitieillo

Steve Roden, An Archive, An Unreliable Narrator [1]

Steve Roden (1964–2023) was a pioneering sound and visual artist, described by The Los Angeles Times as “vivaciously inventive” and a quintessential “artist’s artist.”[2] Born and raised in Southern California, Roden began his artistic life as the lead singer of the punk band the Seditionaries during his teenage years. Alongside his music, he developed a visual art practice, earning a BFA from Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in 1986 and an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in 1989. He studied under influential artists including Emerson Woelffer, Mike Kelley, Stephen Prina, and Gary Panter. Over time, his musical work evolved from the raw energy of punk to indie rock–influenced performances and songs and ultimately to quiet, abstract sound works. In 2017, Roden was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and died from complications related to the illness in 2023.

In the summer of 2019, having learned of Steve’s diagnosis, my friend Michael Raphael encouraged me to join him in Los Angeles, CA, so we could attend the opening of Steve’s solo exhibition at Vielmetter, thinking it might be the last time he’d be able to present a show of that scale with new work. Steve was a long-time friend and sometimes collaborator. I knew him to be one of the most prolific and talented artists I’ve ever encountered.

In 2021, Michael and I learned that Meg Linton, a friend and colleague of Steve and his wife Sari, began documenting Steve’s vast output of paintings, drawings and sculptures.

“What about the media work?” Michael and I wondered.

With access to Steve’s materials, there were countless boxes of audiotapes in numerous formats in addition to videos and films. After some consideration, Sari gave us permission to begin documenting the media works and digital backups (hard drives). By that point, Steve’s ability to communicate had diminished and less than two years later, Steve passed away.

Michael focused on organizing digital media onto an 18TB master drive. I began sorting through the physical formats. On each visit to Pasadena, I’d take a box or two home with me, sometimes also having originals shipped. The process was both overwhelming and deeply intimate. The audio and video formats have included DAT tapes, standard and 4-track cassettes, MiniDiscs, CDRs, as well as hi8, VHS and DV videos.

The tapes were in no particular order, so I assigned them numbers based on what I grabbed first. Most tapes are not dated and I have made no attempt to treat them in the chronology of when they were made. Steve’s labeling was erratic; knowing how he worked, I could make some educated guesses. I had references that I could look to, including Steve’s aging website and his CV. Some tapes are marked with drawings, others have notation systems that we may never fully decipher. Some tapes have accidental misspellings, and some have what I think are probably conscious misspellings. Steve’s title and texts are generally written in all lowercase letters,but not always.

Steve is often credited with creating a form of quiet, minimal, lo-fi music classified as “lowercase.” Steve also used lowercase letters in texts and titles of works. In the liner notes to one of his releases, forms of paper [3]. Steve writes, “while the artworld and popular culture seemed to favor spectacle, i was interested in silence, humility, intimacy, and thus began to describe my work as having a lowercase aesthetic—and i viewed the term as a quiet form of protest.” [4].

So, who is the narrator of the archive? At times, there feels like a number of them/us. There is Steve, before and during the period of his illness. I become another storyteller, as I retype what I find on labels and sometimes make educated guesses as to what I’m reading on a handwritten tape cover or CDR. Any number of times, I’ve entered something only to find I was misreading. A CDR that I first entered into the database as “Hay Hen Mist Sketches,” is later revealed to be sounds made for an installation in Havenhurst Park which Steve notes on his website as Hayvenurst Park.

There are many ways to think of the unreliable narrator here. One version is of the artist who may have been intentionally misdirecting a clean and clear reading of their tapes and the rest. Another aspect could come from the instability of health issues that made logical decisions less logical. Then, another read of the narrator could focus on the interpreter (me) who misreads tape labels, perhaps chooses a focus of their own telling, or has their own unknown reasons to alter the story intentionally or unintentionally. [5] …..

In digging through the material in Steve’s archive, there is humor, seriousness, and details that point to influences, mentors, and collaborators. There is so often conceptual depth and sonic beauty. In a personal favorite moment from 1995, what must be a recording of Steve and collaborators waiting to soundcheck, blaring techno from the house sound system, Steve improvs a bit over the top:

An early moniker, In Between Noise is sometimes written as “in be tween noise, but other times appears as “IBTN" as well as other variations.

Any collection of an artist’s work might be a puzzle to assemble but I’ve just found Steve’s to be particularly complicated, messy, and beguiling in ways that seem specific to his character and approach to art making. I get the sense that he might have hoped someone would be going to the effort of making sense of his material, but also, that it wasn’t expected.

The hard drives reveal more of the whole person than the tapes do. The tapes and films include tracks and raw data for CDs as well as performance documentation, single and multi-channel compositions, interviews, etc. The hard drives also include family photos, bills, correspondence, resumes, graphic scores, documentation of installations and performances, research material. Sometimes going through the hard drives feels too voyeuristic and we mutually decide to move those elements aside…

An email from Sari offers a glimpse of what it is like to make sense of Steve’s history:

*Hi Michael, Hi Stephen,

I realized today another Steve Roden confusing thing…

He named his sound installation at Pasadena city college in 2000 “hanging garden”. He also made a song “airria (hanging garden)” and “aria (hanging garden) second version” which are [both] on the CD, speak no more about the leaves. They were also presented as a sound installation at the Pomona college museum of art in 2003.. Sari* [6]

I continue to collect tapes as travel allows, and can say that amongst the endless treasure there are countless duplicates and variations to sort through, and many more mysteries to be deciphered.

At the time of writing this, I’ve transferred approximately 500 audio, video tapes, and discs, and documented close to 700 more with many more awaiting processing. I’ve created a basic database with the title of each tape, disc or film, the format, the date it was transferred (if applicable), any notes from the tape label, photographs of the physical media, as well as my own research findings and then related emails from Sari as well as friends and collaborators who have been willing to offer feedback.

In 2016 and 2017 the French label, Sonoris released two box–sets of Steve’s rare recordings. I asked Giuseppe LIelasi, the project’s mastering engineer, if any of the label notations I had found corresponded to a system that he was aware of. Giuseppe replied, “so, the sonoris boxsets were quite a funny mess :) weird exports (mono files, files with missing channels, mp3's in low bitrates and what else)…”

That “mess” is arguably something that Steve embraced, as his work emerged out of punk rock and encouraged some level of resistance to conformity. Even with his own iTunes collections, he didn’t seem to mind that they were scanned at the lowest bitrate.

An entry from Steve’s wonderful blog, Airform Archives speaks of a box of cassettes that he’d recently come across that feature recordings of his punk band. Steve speaks of treating the tapes as raw material, rather than a fixed history:

Friday, August 30, 2013 another big birthday....

• today is the 50th anniversary of the cassette tape. for most of us who grew up in the 1970's, this was the first method of recording one's voice and playing it back, as well as creating "playlists" (which most of us elders still call mix-tapes)…*

after all of this, you might think that nostalgia has come into play in relation to some recent works that have been "cassette specific". initially, last year i uncovered several boxes of unmixed tapes of those early awful songs. the 4-track ran at a faster speed than a normal cassette, so that when i placed the 4-track recordings in my regular cassette deck they were very slowed down, pitched down and some of them had tracks running both forwards and backwards at the same time. i decided, because these were my own recordings from many years ago, that i would use them as a kind of collaboration with my younger self and my self now

...

In the years that followed Steve’s diagnosis, there is evidence to suggest that Steve was trying to catalog himself, to make a record of his extraordinary output. Michael Raphael was often a tech resource and worked with Steve to purchase hard drives and to create backups. As brilliant as Steve was, he wasn’t the most technically proficient. Steve was trying to create lists of what he’d done, to transfer material onto hard drives and to make backups, which has helped give us the confidence that we should try to make further sense and to preserve Steve’s history with clarity. This work is done in the hopes of easing the work of a future archivist, who may not have had the firsthand experience and joy of knowing Steve that we were lucky enough to have had.

While working on this project, I reached out to members of Steve’s family, as well as friends and collaborators, asking if they remembered anything specific about the recordings as I was transferring them. Invaluable findings have come in from Steve Peters and Loren Chasse as well as Steve’s wife, Sari. In response to my request for information on their work together, artist Doug Aitken recorded a twelve -minute video where he speaks about the projects that he and Steve made, ranging from jam sessions to scores created for Doug’s video and filmworks, including Blow Debris, Sleepwalkers and other projects.

Early on, I remembered Steve mentioning he had recorded but never released some uncharacteristic “pop” songs based on poems by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. For some time, I couldn’t find the tapes or any record of them. I didn’t know the titles. When I asked Sari, she said I was probably looking in the “wrong” place. Then, out of the blue I received an email from a friend of Steve’s, sound artist Loren Chasse. Loren wrote:

“I know you were archiving our friend's music and I'm wondering if his The Other Steve Roden project crossed your path? You know how he made lots of one offs and this may be one of them, but I'm not sure? He had a singer/songwriter impulse and I was going to release a record of his songs on Jewelled Antler years ago but it never happened, sadly. Anyway, I'd be happy to share "Keeper of Sheep" (songs made from Pessoa texts) if you don't know it already.”

Loren sent me an image of a CDR Steve had shared with him.

I then looked into the assembled hard drive and found multiple versions inside iTunes folders. Most of these did not have Steve’s name and they were tucked into the folders of music he listened to, rather than with any of his work. In some cases, he noted Smin Rownen as the artist. Other Roden was another variable.

What happens next? The plan is that the work will be boxed up and handed off to an established institutional archive in the next year or so. We’ve been advised to have everything ready to go; that the collection will not be taken in bits and pieces. I don’t expect for it to be one easily graspable narrative or easily contained catalog raisonné but my hope is that Michael. Meg, Sari and I are able to clarify some parts of the story of Steve’s work and interpret some of the questions in advance that may come up when others start to examine it all. I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to go through the boxes, making discoveries and love being able to spend time with the beautiful mess that Steve left behind.

*Thank you, Sari Roden, Meg Linton, Michael Raphael, Joana Stillwell *