Over the last thirty years, Steve Roden has risen as a singular voice, attacking and advancing the highest challenges of the avant-garde - blurring the lines between nearly every creative field, moving outwardly toward the boundary with every day life. A visual and sound artist, his work spans the fields of painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, and performance. Following their brilliant box set of rare recordings by the artist from the period between 1988 and 2003, Sonoris returns with a second collection of his output between 2003 and 2008 - A Thousand Breathing Forms.  

A pioneer of Lowercase music, a movement which uses amplification as a means to address the quiet and unheard sounds of objects and environments, Steve Roden is one of the great contemporary successors of John Cage. Looking beyond the shadow cast by chance and indeterminacy, he casts the ear toward a world indicated by the composer’s most original, radical, and often neglected idea -  the value and beauty of the sounds of non-instrumental sources and of the every day. Through subtle intervention, he has illuminated the path for a rising generation of artist working in sound - refusing categorization, working as comfortably in a museum or gallery, as the contexts of music. Guided by rigorous conceptual perimeters and concerns, across A Thousand Breathing Forms the axis of Roden’s work snaps into view - the monumental presence of the smallest moment and sound.

A Thousand Breathing Forms, which collects Roden’s unreleased and hard to find works from the incredibly prolific period between 2003 and 2008, is drenched in musicality. Centered around loop based works, it pulls relentlessly and democratically from a seemingly endless world of source - samples of records from an array of cultures, field recordings, instruments, object, and environments. It is a body of work, which, for being birthed electronic process, appears stunningly organic - steeped in humanity and touch. A world of intimacy. The discrete at a towing scale. A realm to be inhabited, which burrows deep - taking residence in the ear. As it sounds, resonances, and structures intertwine, Roden appears as a vision of the future, and a bridge to the past - a breaking of dogma, and a reconciliation for the schism between Minimalism and the conceptualism of Cage. A world guided by ideas, presenting the profound beauty, meaning, and importance of sound, across its six CDs, A Thousand Breathing Forms is a revelation - a lens into the practice and work of an artist of incredible significance, as much as an opening to the larger field. Capturing and advancing some of the most important and difficult ideas of the last hundred years with elegance, accessibility, and grace, this is a collection which promises to grow over time and at every turn.

Tracklisting :

CD1
1. stars of ice (2008, cdr, new plastic music)
2-9. stills for guru dutt (2004, unreleased)

CD2
1-4. in flows and spuns (2004, released as a 100 copies lp by en/of)
5. 22 letters and the resonance of a three pointed star (2006, compilation track)

CD3
one hour as the bumps of surfaces (2003, radio broadcast, unreleased)

CD4
1. calmem (2008, unreleased)
2. for you the sunrise (2008, unreleased)
3. banjoharmonium (2006, unreleased)

CD5
1. a christmas play for joseph cornell (2007, cdr, new plastic music)
2. thomas sat down and looked at the sea (2004, compilation track)
3. vester fields (2007, cdr, volume projects)

CD6
1. winter is herd or heard (2007, unreleased)
2. to these 4 horizons (2008, unreleased)
3-5. sleep/walk/drive (2003, unreleased)
6. aucla irde lalu ne (2008, compilation track)

+ the 3" CD "A slow moving boat" included in each box.