walking from savoonga to gambell

LINE_090 LINE artist Steve Roden returns with a new collection of five modular synth works. Drones, loops, and jittering melodic tonalities form a strange alien analog soundscape. - at age 6, my father moved from los angeles to alaska for a year, and i have always wondered what the alaskan landscape would sound like (and i don’t mean just the nature sounds, but voices, landscapes, animals, insects, etc.) at certain times, i would cock my ear, hearing in my mind’s ear, a dry and oozy atmosphere that began to grow into a landscape resembling like the landscape of tarkovsky’s stalker—dusted mossy sun of smoked sky tasting like old radish. as a kid who grew up in los angeles, alaska was certainly “other”—and completely outside of what i knew—except for the snow. years, after my father passed away, i had no need to be interest in the real alaska, because for all those years i was building my own alaska inside of me. in the few images my father left to me, his snapshots of alaska look a bit like joshua tree desert in summer, while the winter images seem the land of white carpets of snow. in many of my father’s photographs there is a feeling of emptiness—as if the yellow or white lines along the middle of roads, would lead to nowhere… and as such, i see these images as triggers towards creating a sonic atmosphere... leaving my own works, feeling more like places than stories.