The great record label Dragon’s Eye celebrated its 12th anniversary with a name-your-price, nine-track collection last month. The album is titled Steel and it consists of outtakes and rarities from various members of the Dragon’s Eye roster. If you need one track recommended as a point of entry, start with the lengthy “Deface VIII” by Marc Kate. It’s like the sonic equivalent of a black-gel lava lamp let to run in a bright, empty room. The sound is as if one thick substance is heard to transform in detail as the piece proceeds, a globular instance of shimmer, a hum made present with the sheer suggestive physicality of its undulating resonance. For the most part it is a voluminous thing, many faceted yet singular. At times it momentarily branches into soft estuaries, yet even then they work in parallel, not individual forces but parts of a collective whole.
The entire album is recommended, from the throbbing noise of Geneva Skeen’s “In the night mind of the night world,” to the tornado of coruscation with which Jake Muir’s “Untitled” gets going, to the dense deep bass of “Ride It Out” by the label’s creative director, Yann Novak.
Also featured on Steel are pieces by Steve Pacheco, Tobias Hellkvist, Robert Crouch, wndfrm, and Fabio Perletta. The album is online at dragonseyerecordings.bandcamp.com. More from Dragon’s Eye at dragonseyerecordings.com.