New sounds from Dragon's Eye Recordings
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Label: Dragon's Eye
Year: 2009
Format: CD
We have written few words on this exciting label in the past – put bluntly due to a lack of well-deserved attention on our part – but nonetheless this label of sound artist Yann Novak’s initiative – continuing on the work of his father Paul from the late 80s – focuses on limited edition releases of emerging and aspiring sound artists. The label is also curated with the intention of its base of artists given the chance to develop relationships and spur new projects. In such a way the catalogue may be regarded as a product and dynamically evolving creation of human collaboration – gently nursed by Yann Novak.
In this feature, we focus on the label’s two new releases for July 2009, signed LA-based Ryan Connor, recording as Sublamp, and a recorded, installation piece from the Canadian Jamie Drouin. These two releases share some characteristics and demonstrate the aesthetic and artistic principles by which Dragon’s Eye nurtures its practice and developing catalogue and as such serves as a good measure for us at Soundscaping to finally shed some light on this label and its roster.
Sublamp brings us Breathletters, 9 compositions over two thirds of an hour worth of harmonic and abstract sounds to explore a new form of communication, emotional or ethereal if you will. And in the soundscapes carefully composed out of integral details of acoustic instruments like glockenspiel, organs, guitars, strings and other devices and field recordings, Ryan Connor adeptly puts the listener in a state where you witness traces of this metalanguage of emotion – socalled breathletters that manifest themselves before you without ever becoming tangible. The soundscapes of Sublamp take on both intimate hues and more abstract, hollow characteristics and through growth and decay come in and out of focus. Sometimes one feels like observing something grandiose in the distance without really closing in, yet other times the slow growth rises and you succumb to the monster wave of sound in which details are very evident as the tonal curves reach their momentary peaks.
Such are the ebb and flow qualities of Jamie Drouin‘s work – A Three Month Warm Up too although with a very different offset. The warm-up of a symphony orchestra is the inspiration – and the basis through which over 120 field recordings of such a phase were made in an outdoor public area in Victoria. The symphony’s sounds broken down into its constituent pieces and instruments from that one, united sound as a basis, Drouin then stretched and expanded those sounds across a longer expanse – in which was also presented as a sound installation over a period of 3 months for the Assume Nothing exhibition at the Art Gallery og Greater Victoria in the winter of 2009. Not easily recognisable in its transformed, droning form as the familiar, cacophony of a symphony orchestra coursing its way to reach a concord where it all unites as one, yet the long-form sonic textures are comforting and incur a calmness as waves of sound grow in force then dissipate again, together and also with the feeling of separate forces – instruments – reaching to attain the same level to play in unison.
In spite of our negligence of focus on Dragon’s Eye in the past, let it be known we are avid listeners and on this very occasion more than recommend each of these two releases if you – like us – revel in experiments in sound artistry.
Web resources:
Dragon’s Eye Recordings website
Sublamp website
Jamie Drouin website
