Dust-to-Digital : I Listen to the Wind That Obliterates My Traces [DTD-20]

Vintage Photographs and Recordings from the collection of Steve Roden

Official Release Date: August 2, 2011

... i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces brings together a collection of vintage photographs related to music, a group of 78rpm recordings, and short excerpts from various literary sources that are contemporary with the sound and images. It is a somewhat intuitive gathering, culled from artist Steve Roden’s collection of thousands of vernacular photographs related to music, sound, and listening. The subjects range from the PT Barnum-esque Professor McRea - “Ontario’s Musical Wonder” (pictured with his complex sculptural one man band contraption) - to anonymous African-American guitar players and images of early phonographs. The images range from professional portraits to ethereal, accidental, double exposures - and include a range of photographic print processes, such as tintypes, ambrotypes, cdvs, cabinet cards, real photo postcards, albumen prints, and turn-of-the-century snapshots.

The two CDs display a variety of recordings, including one-off amateur recordings, regular commercial releases, and early sound effects records. there is no narrative structure to the book, but the collision of literary quotes (Hamsun, Lagarkvist, Wordsworth, Nabokov, etc.). Recordings and images conspire towards a consistent mood that is anchored by the book’s title, which binds such disparate things as an early recording of an American cowboy ballad, a poem by a Swedish Nobel laureate, a recording of crickets created artificially, and an image of an itinerant anonymous woman sitting in a field, playing a guitar. The book also contains an essay by Roden.

Acknowledgments & Reviews

What People Are Saying About This Title

All Songs Considered: What are you guys listening to these days? Anything you can't get enough of?
Jeff Tweedy: There's a two-CD collection, it comes as part of a book, called, I think I'm gonna get the title right ...i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces. It's on Dust-to-Digital records. It's just this incredible collection of photographs from the 1800s and early 1900s of musicians. And then the two CDs that come with it are recordings of 78s. Some of them are even archival, kind of retrievals of sound effects for movies. Like there's this one of wind from the '30s, just really an incredible collection.

"...i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces feels like something altogether different, though, more like a silent movie, a collection crafted from crumbs of the past. Tucked within the simple, minimally designed book's front and back covers is the music, which Roden organized into a two-volume mix of similarly excavated documents culled from flea market 78 rpm discs. With no biographical information on the singers provided, each song arrives devoid of context: class, race, ethnicity vanish. One mysterious, anonymous piano and voice ballad, identified only as 'societe anonyme,' feels like a lost Kurt Weill miniature. 'Graveyard Love,' by Bertha Idaho, recorded in 1928, is followed by Frank Luther's 1940 version of the haunting ballad 'Pretty Polly,' followed by an undated, crackly field recording of birds in an aviary. The birds and other natural sounds and sound effects punctuate each 60-minute disc with eerie moments of texture: Artificial wind blows from a century ago, a slide whistle mimics a howl; footsteps stomp through squeaky snow. 'I wanted to disrupt this notion that anything can be played on shuffle,' says Roden of the sequencing process. "There's not a narrative to it, but those are breaths, they're pauses. They're moments of contemplation, and they break up the segments of songs — like a sonnet or something. There's a form to it.'" - Randall Roberts, Los Angeles Times