This is the final release of this version of Dragon’s Eye Recordings – Yann Novak has announced that he will suspend further new releases indefinitely as he focuses on his own artistic output in L.A. and Seattle. As such, Ælab’s Riding is an appropriately reflective final outing (though it’s not strictly final for the label). Ælab mostly consists of sound artist and engineer Stéphane Claude, joined at this juncture by Gisèle Trudel at an ambitious art residency in New Zealand. This recording was made from a one-night installation, played in the dark in a botanical garden to cap the residency. The rhetoric here links the physical act of making a field recording – observing the environment, shedding expectations, being still and quiet – with meditation on one’s relationship with nature.
These are made up mostly of serene, lightly processed field recordings, beating sine wave oscillations, and simple synth lines. The field recordings move seamlessly and beautifully between zones, and the almost-nothingness of the sine waves on “Steel Spaces” is extraordinary. But the timbre of the synth at the beginning of “Whale Tail” is puzzling and initially distracting for me – rather ‘80s, to put it crudely. Through repetition, the synth attempts to dissolve into the rest of the environment, but its imposition only reminds us of the sad thought that humans by nature aren’t fully able to do this. I wonder if Claude and Trudel would disagree based on their experience.
