Steve Roden new double album! "Small songs for Kack Jirby began in 2014, when i stopped performing with the tools I had used since 1993 (pedals, contact mics, cassettes, etc.). As I was trying to find a way to some 'new' tools, various friends had suggested I work with a modular synthesizer. At the time, I didn't know anything about the modular, but it offered me the thing I wanted - something I didn't understand, and to begin again as a musical child. Instead of working for several years to master the instrument I simply tried to work with the materials, while trying to make something that had the 'feel' of my work. The recordings on small songs for kack jirby come from the very first months when myself and the machine tried very hard to become friends - and it seemed that after years of working in a specific mode, these first steps with a new instrument along with a new sound pallette should be documented, and so, these little pieces are the beginning of a new phase of my work. (Also, the name 'Kack Jirby' is a play on the name of my favorite childhood comic book artist - Jack Kirby).' Steve Roden.
350 copies. Full color gatefold cover + inserts.

Steve Roden is a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles, living in Pasadena. His work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, text and performance. Roden’s working process uses various forms of specific notation (words, musical scores, maps, etc.) and translates them through self invented systems into scores, which then influence the process of painting, drawing, sculpture, and composition. These scores, rigid in terms of their parameters and rules, are also full of holes for intuitive decisions, failures and left turns. The inspirational source material becomes a kind of formal skeleton that the abstract finished works are built upon. In the visual works, translations of information such as text and maps, become rules and systems for generating visual actions such as color choices, number of elements, amounts of time and form building.

In the sound works, singular source materials such as objects, architectural spaces, and field recordings, are abstracted through humble electronic processes to create new audio spaces, or possible landscapes. The sound works present themselves with an aesthetic Roden has described as lower case – sound concerned with subtlety and the quiet activity of listening.