Forms of Paper (2024 remaster)

The 10-minute piece looped for a month at low volume in the atrium of the Frank Gehry-designed Frances Howard Goldwyn Hollywood Regional Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, from speakers resting on pages taken from a discarded science text. The volume was quiet enough, he later explained, that the audio never reached the upstairs reading room; the sound remained clandestine, subliminal, a hidden feature of the building. It was, nonetheless, an audacious choice of sound art for a public institution, and one anonymous visitor hid a small electronic toy emitting cricket sounds in a nearby bookcase—whether as a critique, one-upmanship, or an attempt at a virtual duet, it’s impossible to say.

Reworked into an hour-long composition, Forms of Paper was first released in 2001, although Roden later expressed frustration with the mastering: “The disc sounded relatively ok at a very very low volume,” he wrote, “but if anyone listened to it at a normal listening volume or on headphones, it wasn’t the piece I’d intended at all.” His friend Bernhard Günter, of the Trente Oiseaux label, remastered the record’s first reissue, in 2011; it’s been remastered again by Taylor Deupree for this new reissue (which includes its first vinyl edition). Without immediate access to the two previous editions, I can’t compare their nuances, but this version demands a sort of sweet spot on the volume dial—loud enough to appreciate the detail, but not too loud, because certain resonant frequencies become almost uncomfortable if overamplified.

For all the record’s humble origins, Forms of Paper can be an intensely psychedelic listening experience, conjuring a dynamic matrix of footsteps, purring cats, whirly tubes, and shortwave transmissions. Not nearly as tranquil as you might expect, it’s full of erratic movements, insect-like skittering, and unexpected shifts in volume. The lack of obvious progression or development contributes to the unsettling air; you don’t so much move purposefully through the piece as drift without aim, propelled by unpredictable gusts. The album hovers eerily somewhere between Chris Watson and Philip Jeck—it might be a transmission from a fragile and indecipherable alternate dimension swarming with ghosts.

Roden died in September 2023, just 59 years old, six years after he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. At the risk of sentimentalizing his death, the disease throws Forms of Paper in a poignant new light. To revisit Roden’s work is to be reminded not just of its formal vision, but also its unusual thoughtfulness. I find some small solace in the fact that a part of Roden lives on in Forms of Paper, a tribute to books: the best technology for preserving memory—and, by extension, immortality—that humans have yet devised.

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