Lowercase is a loose aesthetic of extremely quiet electronic and electroacoustic music that took shape around the turn of the millennium. The American artist Steve Roden described his own approach as lower case sound: work built from tiny, often processed noises, modest in volume and gesture, that does not demand attention but waits to be found, in deliberate contrast to music written, as it were, in capitals.
Its best-known document is Roden’s Forms of Paper, released in 2001 on Richard Chartier’s label LINE. It began as a sound installation for the Hollywood branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, a building designed by Frank Gehry, and every sound on it comes from book pages being handled, then electronically processed. Chartier, Bernhard Günter and Taylor Deupree are among the artists associated with the tendency. Lowercase shares with drone a patience for minute change, but it works at the edge of audibility, where the listener’s own room becomes part of the piece.