Steve RODEN
“O.T.R. and U.T.R.”

Limited edition of 150 copies (of which only 100 are for sale) with unique hand made collages on every cover

In Steve Roden’s onw words: “a few years ago, my mother gave me a small stack of 45s of some of her favorite songs as a kid; chuck berry, the platters, and others. when i began to listen to the records, i was not only excited about the music, but the surface-scuffs from my mother¹s repeated listening over the years of wear and tear.
the source for u.t.r. and o.t.r. is a recording of ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ by the dimensions.

What you are hearing are the processed sounds of the surface noise at the beginning and end of the record – the first and last notes of the song.
the experience of listening to a vinyl record is not only a durational experience, but a physical experience. when the needle is dropped upon the record at the beginning and picking it up at the end, it is a kind of performance.
in this piece, i wanted to explore the unintentional sounds – to emphasize the ‘before-song’ and the ‘after-song’.
In the final seconds of listening to a 45, when the needle becomes trapped in the repetitive rhythm that is born of a locked groove, these clicks become a process of disintegration. the constant clicks offer a kind of lullaby like the aging process of a human being¹s body and skin as it changes. every time a piece of vinyl is played, new wrinkles, scars, scratches, scrapes, chips, and detritus are created and so here, i wanted to highlight the unintentional soundings caused by handling, to move away from the perfect veneer. The more a record is handled, the more the music is transformed to an entirely different atmosphere – where disturbances and interruptions can overwhelm a song. Listening to the sound of a needle trapped within the final groove of one of my mother’s records, i think i must be hearing the exact thing she heard while listening to the same object possibly 10 years before i was born. as the record continues to offer the clicks and nothing else, i imagine my mother falling asleep to one of her favorite songs. there, in her darkened bedroom, she sleeps to the after-sound of the needle stuck in a groove.

As she sleeps, her ears absorb the minimalist rhythmic click, like a lullaby – and as the needle endlessly circles the outer realm of the record label clicking until morning…”