via I Heart Noise comes a wonderful essay by Stephen Vitiello about his work with Michael Raphael to go through the media and audio archive left behind by artist Steve Roden. Vitiello first presented the project at a CAA panel on sound art methodologies last fall in Chicago.
Roden, who passed away in 2023, left hundreds of recordings ranging back to his earliest punk band days: “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.”
Rather than non-systematic, the material Vitiello describes feels continuously variable and multi-systematic, and somehow if a piece with Roden’s own history and way of working. This first pass through the material is in preparation, Vitiello explains, for a more comprehensive archival processing, when an institutional home for it is determined. This phase is the sorting and sense-making and memory-stretching for a group of family, friends and collaborators, so that Roden’s work will be preserved and presented to the world as effectively as possible.
Meanwhile, a slow but steady collection of rediscovered or remastered works from Roden’s many years of exhibitions and performances are turning up on Roden’s Bandcamp. The latest, from July 2025, is Ear(th), recordings based on a 1999 earthquake monitor for a 2004 sound/sculptural collaboration with scientists, sculptors, and coders in Pasadena.
Steve Roden: An Archive, An Unreliable Narrator [thekitchen.org via @iheartnoise]