“Watercamel” is like a rarified collection of broken bell tones, their shards laid out with great care on a long narrow table in order for them to be cataloged, notated, attended to. The short composition, under three minutes in length, starts strong and suddenly, and then just as suddenly fades for a short, ear-cleaning spell, before entering into the full heft of the piece. It’s then that the round tones appear, sliced here and there, rendered as quivering moirés and bracing drone fragments, proceeding one after another: a shudder here, an insectoid whir there. A full, unsullied bell is never heard. Instead it’s all rough-edged slivers and mists of particulates. The result is deeply ceremonial.

The piece is by Morten Jeamland and was originally posted at [soundcloud.com/orteneamland](https://soundcloud.com/orteneamland/watercamel).

Jana Rockstroh, the German musician who records simply as Jaja, composed and performed *Music for Space Observation* after hours as 2017 was easing into 2018. It was released the first day of the new year. The album contains three longform tracks, each between 22 and 30 minutes, of slow-paced ambient music. As the title suggests, this is space music: outer, inner, room-filling, head-expanding. It’s all loose sine waves given seconds — and, seemingly, eons — to chart their course. Slight modulations lend a sense of development to the glacial tones, texture provides a richness sometimes lost in synth-heavy work, and layers (especially on the opening track, “Far Beyond the Realm of the Stars”) introduce metric play even when there is no self-evident rhythm. While the first two pieces (“Far Beyond” and “Earthrise Over the Moon”) are often lovely and soft, the closing piece, “In the Realm of the Nebulae,” ventures into darker corners of the evening sky, as white noise and urgent drones threaten to encompass the listener.

Album originally posted at [jajaouterspace.bandcamp.com](https://jajaouterspace.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-space-observation). More from Jaja/Rockstroh at [cyan-music.com](http://www.cyan-music.com/jaja/).

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](https://dragonseyerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/steel-dragons-eye-twelfth-anniversary). More from Dragon’s Eye at [dragonseyerecordings.com](http://www.dragonseyerecordings.com).