The library is a place of quiet, they say—or whisper, anyway, the schoolmarmish cartoon librarian holding an insistent finger to furiously pursed lips. But beneath that caricature, a world of sound extends like tree roots just below the surface of perception: humming fluorescent lights and scraping chair legs, creaking radiators and footsteps on marble stairwells, clacking keyboards and retirees snoring in the periodicals section. Beneath it all, the books themselves, and their pages—grazed by fingertips, rustling as they turn, breezily falling together as the covers thwack shut.
In 2001, as part of a series called Six Degrees: Art in the Libraries, the Los Angeles multimedia artist and composer Steve Roden created an installation made entirely of the sounds of books and paper being touched and manipulated, which he then reworked digitally into an otherworldly stream of richly textured sound.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Roden was at the forefront of a loose movement dedicated to coaxing unexpected sounds out of everyday life by harnessing contact mics, electrical interference, and happenstance. His work was adjacent to a strain of digital minimalism known as microsound, but he preferred the term “lowercase,” which he described to The Wire in 1997: “small music that is humble, that allows the listener to discover it, to wander round in it.” In a world growing noisier by the day, he believed, “This is a more subtle and subversive way of getting people to pay attention.”
The piece was quintessentially Roden; he had built his entire art practice on the quotidian, the marginal, the ignored. Deeply invested in the possibilities of translation and mistranslation—not just between languages, but also between media or even senses of perception—Roden’s work frequently revolved around objects, interiors, and landscapes. The 1997 piece splint (the soul of wood) was made entirely out of the sounds of striking, bowing, and rubbing a 1943 plywood leg splint by Charles Eames; 1998’s lamp (within/without the skin) took a similar approach to a 1952 bubble lamp by designer George Nelson. Not all his readymades came with fancy pedigrees: 2002’s winter couplet was sourced from two teacups and played back through speakers connected through cardboard tubes, while 2006’s oionos, an installation for a rustic Athens church restored by the architect Dimitris Pikionis, incorporated tin whistles and toy harmonicas.
Many of Roden’s pieces, Forms of Paper included, have a kind of meta sensibility: For 1999’s View, he created a gallery installation out of sounds sourced from the ledge of the gallery window, a sonic equivalent to the room-sized pinhole camera. But the principal throughline in his work is its abiding quiet—combined, perhaps, with the idea that deep inside all that hushed rustling, an indecipherable language is trying to make itself heard. That’s certainly the case with Forms of Paper, which betrays little hint of its tactile source material; its liquid burbling and keening resonance sound more like an amplified underwater soundscape, a cryptic field of ocean currents and dolphin cries, swarming krill and hermit crabs scuttling along the seafloor.
The 10-minute piece looped for a month at low volume in the atrium of the Frank Gehry-designed Frances Howard Goldwyn Hollywood Regional Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, from speakers resting on pages taken from a discarded science text. The volume was quiet enough, he later explained, that the audio never reached the upstairs reading room; the sound remained clandestine, subliminal, a hidden feature of the building. It was, nonetheless, an audacious choice of sound art for a public institution, and one anonymous visitor hid a small electronic toy emitting cricket sounds in a nearby bookcase—whether as a critique, one-upmanship, or an attempt at a virtual duet, it’s impossible to say.
Reworked into an hour-long composition, Forms of Paper was first released in 2001, although Roden later expressed frustration with the mastering: “The disc sounded relatively ok at a very very low volume,” he wrote, “but if anyone listened to it at a normal listening volume or on headphones, it wasn’t the piece I’d intended at all.” His friend Bernhard Günter, of the Trente Oiseaux label, remastered the record’s first reissue, in 2011; it’s been remastered again by Taylor Deupree for this new reissue (which includes its first vinyl edition, via Mexico's Aurora Central, and featuring new cover art by Roden). Without immediate access to the two previous editions, I can’t compare their nuances, but this version demands a sort of sweet spot on the volume dial—loud enough to appreciate the detail, but not too loud, because certain resonant frequencies become almost uncomfortable if overamplified.
For all the record’s humble origins, Forms of Paper can be an intensely psychedelic listening experience, conjuring a dynamic matrix of footsteps, purring cats, whirly tubes, and shortwave transmissions. Not nearly as tranquil as you might expect, it’s full of erratic movements, insect-like skittering, and unexpected shifts in volume. The lack of obvious progression or development contributes to the unsettling air; you don’t so much move purposefully through the piece as drift without aim, propelled by unpredictable gusts. The album hovers eerily somewhere between Chris Watson and Philip Jeck—it might be a transmission from a fragile and indecipherable alternate dimension swarming with ghosts.
Roden died in September 2023, just 59 years old, six years after he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. At the risk of sentimentalizing his death, the disease throws Forms of Paper in a poignant new light. To revisit Roden’s work is to be reminded not just of its formal vision, but also its unusual thoughtfulness. I find some small solace in the fact that a part of Roden lives on in Forms of Paper, a tribute to books: the best technology for preserving memory—and, by extension, immortality—that humans have yet devised.
