Reponse to Steve Roden’s “Airria (Hanging Gardens) Second Version”

“Something which is directly the cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages…” (Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” p. 181)

Although Roden uses voice in his piece “Airria (Hanging Gardens) Second Version,” it can hardly be described as song. He wavers between barely audible whispers and near-gurgles, and though he occasionally hints at speech, the words never emerge fully formed. In Roden’s voice the sound produced by his vocal chords are soft and unsurprising, but his use of the “voice” extends past that. Roden also produces the sound of a mouth opening and closing, lips being wetted, and the saliva being shifted within the mouth. As a listener, one can’t know to what extent these sounds are simulated. Like the hint of language in his voice, however, this uncertainty merely increases the tantalization, and forces the listeners to insert themselves into Roden’s body. While listening, we wet our lips, and are immediately implicated in the music. The body’s sounds, in particular the wet, sloppy sounds of the mouth, are the primary events in Roden’s piece. The rest, which might be more appropriately termed music, is, to return a word to its original definition, ambient. Roden instead takes the sounds involved in speech, but not normally understood as affecting its meaning, and places them in the position of the signifier. We understand Roden as saliva and gurgles, the voice drowning in its location.