Most piano and electronics recordings take the Alva Noto / Ryuichi Sakamoto approach, preserving the percussive attack of the keyboard while toying respectfully with the sustain. Even Fennesz succumbed to the Japanese artist’s niceties, his two collaborations disappointing in their lack of critical engagement. New York-based, Iranian born Son of Rose aka Kamran Sadeghi takes a more tactile, almost alchemical approach, manipulating the piano’s strings with various objects and digital processing. ‘All In’ is his fourth album and offers a varied yet coherent statement, teetering on the brink between pleasant ambient sound and abstract noise.

The most obvious referent here is, surprisingly, Taylor Deupree, particularly his fondness for gently shimmering sine tones, but Sadhegi’s more willing to reveal his music’s acoustic origins, albeit obliquely. In ‘Falling Forward’, for instance, the opening moments – all lush pads and heavenly chimes – recall Kompakt Pop Ambient, but cracks soon appear, allowing wood and string to jut out. ‘Movement Transposed’ is more obvious, strummed and reverbed strings resembling a multitracked harp, while ‘Nineteen Sixty Five’ is abrupt, metallic swathes looming, lurching, and scratched. While short at three and a half minutes, the final ‘Fragrant’ is perhaps the most inspired, treated scrapes, bows and pings left to meander, calmly lost, like moments of gagaku.

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Its been two and a half years since Dragon’s Eye debuted the visual identity that has held so many of our release.  I felt like the start of summer was a great time to debut the new look and package design of Dragon’s eye Recordings.  The package its self will be a little different but I don’t want to give away to much so I will just show you the cover from one of two upcoming releases that will wear the new look.

All In, the fourth full-length CD release from Son of Rose (sound and video artist Kamran Sadeghi) comprises recordings made between 2004 and 2009. As he did on his previous, 2007 release Divisions In Parallel, Sadeghi combines real-time digital signal processing and prepared piano (the album lists piano, ebow, drums, electronic treatments as instrumentation) in eight pieces that were recorded live and in which post-production alterations are kept to a minimum. Though organ isn’t listed as one of the instruments, an organ-like sound functions as the nucleus in many tracks and as a result a subtly transcendent aura pervades the release. That organ emphasis also imbues the music with an Eastern and psychedelic aura, perhaps most clearly felt during “All In,” for example, where one can easily imagine a singing group sitting in a circle within a temple chanting along to the organ drone while it glistens and smolders. Elsewhere, Sadeghi wraps lulling ambient drones such as “Row” and “Toward Sensation” in billowing layers of reverberant hiss and disrupts their quietude with percussive ruptures. Static and synthetic sounds constellate around flowing tendrils of shimmering wave-like tones in “Falling Forward” while loud fluttering flourishes persist with indomitable force in “Radii” and then morph into interlocking patterns of staccato chords. Only “Movement Transposed” brings the piano to stage center when its inner strings are dragged across to produce shimmering strums.

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Yann Novak, now 30 years old and a native of Madison, Wisconsin, lived in Seattle for eight years. Here is where he came of age, where he worked in a coffee shop near the art museum that never showed his work, and where he went home to his building of artist lofts, to his community of collaborators and commiserators. Last November, after falling in love with a Californian and finding himself finished with rainy winters, he moved to Los Angeles. It’s impossible not to note the irony in the fact that this highly emotional relocation turns out to be the subject of Novak’s first big solo show in Seattle—that his coming out is the same as his moving out. But Relocation, as the show is called, tells a larger story, too, about all kinds of movings on, from any position of relative comfort into a newness, and the way the process itself changes the terms you thought you understood about each location when you made the decision. The place you decided to leave is better than ever; along the way, you keep reading the landscape for clues that won’t matter anyway; and arriving is not arriving but starting something from a weird and awkward distance away from where you’ll eventually locate yourself. (Do you ever have this experience, where your mind roams back to the way you saw your apartment for the first time? That’ll be your last view, too.)

Novak does not waste his chance to make a first impression. In fact, with remarkable economy he transforms the three rooms he’s been given to work with into chambers where you can be transported into states of mind that feel both personal and familiar. Using digitally altered field recordings (in which the sounds are heightened but the time is real) and snapshots digitally stitched together and abstracted into gleaming videos, Novak both fills the work up with his subjective experience and empties it out to make room for you. There’s just enough specificity and just enough blankness.

I know, technically, how Novak made this work, but I don’t quite know how it works. The closest I can get to describing his approach is that it’s a combination of generosity and restraint. Each detail being so firmly in place means that the rest is open. For instance, the first work you come across, Relocation: Vacant, at first seems like a simple sound installation with no visual content. One small speaker hangs in each corner of the white cube, and a larger subwoofer sits on the floor next to an amplifier and a DVD player (used to send the sound to the four speakers, as in a home entertainment system) in front of a bench. But then you begin to notice the cords coiled in the corners under the speakers rather than hidden in the walls, as if they’re the last things to be packed up, and the preposterous way the DVD player and amplifier have each been set on custom-built white pedestals to make them the same height as the subwoofer, which is all the same height and length as the bench across the room. The space is in a careful and anxious state—done up as much as undone—as if you’d walked in on the briefly unmade bed of a very neat person. It is a reinterpretation of the situation in which the recording was made, the night before Novak left, when all that was left was a mattress, a refrigerator, and a recorder sitting on the floor, turned on while Novak went out to get dinner. The place was empty, but it was as full for Novak (of memories) as it was going to get.

Relocation: Mobile is in the hallway between two rooms, mimicking the U-Haul trip that’s represented abstractly on a large video projection made of photographs Novak took out the window on the straight shot down I-5, and in two sets of headphones that isolate two viewers as if they were each passengers. Waves of blurry color, waves of zooming sound—you’re moving between points at all times, riding the emotional ground. It is never visually obvious whether you’re seeing out the front or the side windows of the truck, as horizon lines and views always shift into some other form just as they seem about to come into focus. It’s not just that your perspective changes, it’s that your axis of perspective is in flux, from forward-back to side-to-side.

To find out what happens when Novak finally arrives, you enter a black-box space through black curtains for Relocation: Dislocation. I won’t tell you too much, except that the video is made of three photographs taken out the southern-exposure roll-up door on his new loft home (shared with his partner, artist Robert Crouch, who cocurated the group show in the front gallery at Lawrimore Project). The sound is from the same location. There’s a sparkle, rhythm, and lack of clarity to the newness—and in fact, the camera is shooting through corrugated plastic. The glittering white of the projection—a transformation of the now-dull-seeming white (Seattle) walls of Relocation: Vacant in the other room—is blinding.

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Dragon Eye’s latest addition to its “sound art” catalogue comes by way of Oakland, California-based Lissom, in “real life” Tana Sprague, a sound and video artist who also works as the Production Manager and Assistant Director of Recombinant Media Labs (founded by Naut Humon and located in San Francisco ). Sprague’s debut full-length under the Lissom name, Nest of Iterations, is an accomplished fifty-minute set of organic, slowly-evolving soundscapes that perpetuates Dragon Eye’s solid streak of innovative electronic releases. The Lissom release features seven pieces, all of them sharing certain qualities but exemplifying differences too. In general, Sprague weaves field recordings, acoustic, and synthesized sounds into micro-detailed set-pieces that unfold like constantly shifting weather patterns, and at times suggest what the amplified recording of a body’s circulatory system might sound like. Elements swim in a deep mix that’s at times reminiscent in its density of an ambient-dub production. The opening “Fallow,” with its billowing clouds of grainy hiss, soft tinkles, bass tones, and whispered voices, and “Forage,” where reverb-heavy punctuations and a rhythm bed of decayed vinyl ripples converge, are characteristic of the Lissom style, but it’s the two restrained pieces at the release’s end that leave the strongest impression. Following the quiet ruminations of the penultimate “Stark,” we get the twelve-minute outro “Refract,” a melancholic, even somber exercise that proves single-handedly that emotional character can infuse even the most abstract electronic music.

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