*100 copies limited edition tape, includes an in-depth interview with the artist on Side B.* In 2023, the context of experiment music lost one of its great, quiet forces with the untimely passing of the Los Angeles based artist Steve Roden. One of the pioneers of Lowercase music, for more than 30 years Roden entirely changed our relationship to sound and the creative act via a prolific and endlessly engrossing and ambitious body of releases, as well as an expansive practice that also blurred the boundaries between music, painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, and performance. His absence has left a remarkable hole in our world. Keeping the fire alive and helping to make his contributions available to wider audiences, the fantastic Monterrey, Mexico, based imprint, Aurora Central, now returns off the back of some killer recent releases by Mabe Fratti, Merzbow, Concepción Huerta and Camilo Ángeles, Xiu Xiu, Gibrana Cervantes, and numerous others, delivering the first ever vinyl pressing of Roden’s seminal 2001 full length, “Forms of Paper”, bringing it back into print for the first time in more than two decades. An absolutely stunning, deeply intimate work, comprising constellations of microscopic sounds, even after all these years this deeply effecting work feels ahead of our time and brings Roden’s incredible contribution to experimental sound practice to the forefront of the consciousness once again. Issued in a beautifully produced, newly remastered vinyl edition of 250 copies, this is unquestionably one of the most essential reissues of 2025 so far.

First emerging during the early 1990s, Steve Roden was a pioneer of Lowercase music, a movement that uses amplification as a means to address the subtle and overlooked sounds of objects and environments. Within a body of work that spans many dozens of albums - guided by rigorous conceptual perimeters and concerns - he continuously pushed forward over the course of more than three decades, harnessing the inherent value possessed by sonorous material generated by non-instrumental sources and everyday life, and illuminated the path for countless artists following in his wake. Offering monumental presence to the smallest moment and sound, his 2001 full length, “Forms of Paper”, can be regarded as a landmark in the idiom.

At the time of the appearance of “Forms of Paper”, its author had already been active on the scene for more than a decade, sculpting a deeply conceptual and rigorous body of work at the borders of sound art and experimental music, first appearing in 1990 on the cassette “The Secret of Happiness” before picking up momentum during the latter 1990s and early 2000s with "Crop Circles", “Translations & Articulations”, “View”, and “Four Possible Landscapes”, all of which planted a deep impression within the percolating context of sound practice during that moment. “Forms of Paper” was his first release with Line, an imprint with which he would continue to work over the course of his life, which describes itself as a “programmatic sound platform with a strong inclination towards the visual arts and multimedia, born from the desire to take the tactile qualities of audio installations from the gallery space to listeners’ living rooms”: a perfect orientation toward where this album sits within the creative landscape.

“Forms of Paper” was originally created for the “Art in the Libraries Exhibition” at the Hollywood Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, taking on the quiet character of libraries as a central consideration, and was amplified at a very low volume level. Maintaining conceptual coherency and drawing further upon the environment for which it was originally conceived, the piece entirely draws its sonorous palette from the sounds of book pages being handled. Shortly after, Roden then expanded and re-worked the material from the installation into a one hour composition. Describing his intentions, Roden stated: “I imagine the work as something of a folded piece of white paper sculpture; where shadows, folds, and light enable one to see not only the white of the paper, but a full spectrum of grays as well.”

Despite the clear and single source of auditory materiality of “Forms of Paper”, the work is about as far removed from the expected as could be, as Roden entirely transforms the locatability of his source material through unknown forms of processing. Unfurling as a glacially paced landscape of microscopic sounds and pointillistic detail, percolating, bubbling, rustling, and pulsing, continuously alluding, though its structures and interactions, to the natural world, despite the synthetic appearances of populating sounds.

A deeply intimate work occupied with a total sense of self and explored at the pace that Roden sets, “Forms of Paper” is a gesture of truly rare creative artistry that remains as radical and challenging nearly a two and half decades since it first entered the world: as humble and understated as it is staggering and earth shattering. It’s a marvel that we can’t possibly recommend enough and a lovely tribute to the life and legacy of Roden, one of the great artists of our time.