Steve Roden is a painter, designer, video-maker, and "sound artist," who made a pretty big name for himself as the pioneer of the genre lowercase. Lowercase as a genre combines Ambient and Minimalism, amplifying quiet, usually unheard, sounds to extreme levels. From paper, to light bulbs, broken tape recorders, eerie breathing, and whatever else. Roden created the genre in 2001 with his piece Forms of Paper, which is 54 minutes of sheer silent noises amplified by electronic equipment.
His play style is considered odd because there is no real technique to it. He claims he wants his sound art to be real and guttural. His work is best described as "Abstract". All his work - paintings, videos, sound art - is pretty weird.
Tropes that apply to Steve and his work:
- Ambient: He even created a new genre, lowercase.
- Avant-Garde Music: With how weird his music is, this is a more general term for it.
- Cloud Cuckoo Lander: He's uh... odd, to put it lightly. He once performed John Cage's "4'33"" every day for a year in Berlin, he once got a bunch of stuff from the state of Martha Graham without knowing what it was, went to the archives of a German philosopher, Walter Benjamin, without speaking German and went to see what he could pull from this, and bases his sound art off of other peoples art and his own.
- Collector of the Strange: Incredibly old photos of people playing or carrying instruments. These were curated (along with an expansive collection of 78s) in ...i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces.
- Electronic Music: Kind of... most of the instruments he uses are electronic or something else, processed electronically
- Everything Is an Instrument: Much of Roden's work is deeply conceptual, and often tied to a location, item, or person. As a side effect, his pieces can incorporate anything from field recordings (from archives or his own travels) to household objects and fixtures, to random children's toys, to incredibly old records. A Big Circle Drawn With Little Hands was composed with sounds made by the contents of a package the label owner sent him.
- Epic Rocking: Well, more like Epic Ambienting. However, 90% of his work is incredibly long. It'd be easier to list his songs that aren't 10 minutes or longer.
- Genre-Busting: His music takes roots in everything from ambient and drone to musique concrete and minimalism.
- Jack of All Stats: He has discussed this, saying he doesn't actually feel that and moreso sees his multimedia-ness as giving him a bigger sense of enlightenment because he seeks where all these things connect.
- Loudness War: Oddly inverted—much of his music is mastered considerably lower than the standard, in keeping with his intention that it should fade into the background.
- Minimalism: From his sound art, to his paintings, videos, and everything else. If there's one thing we can pin him back on, it's this.
