(July 2009) It seems like only yesterday that NY-based Iranian-born Kamran Sadeghi's 2007 Dragon's Eye debut as Son of Rose was sat on the review pile. Divisions In Parallel gave notice of an experimental artist who shepherded sounds towards finding structure and harmonics without overdetermining their route, allowing access to interesting pathways and odd tangents along the way. Now on his own label, just a couple of years on, here's his fourth full-length, All In, finding him still engrossed in exploring prepared piano through digital processing. Sadeghi this time sets out "to capture the holistic immediacy of each composition" by deploying live takes and minimal post-production interventions, and the approach does in fact feel more tactile this time, as piano strings are manipulated with various objects, DSPedal less indiscriminately to the metal.

Initially, static spray and synth-shimmer conspire on the tone-tides of "Falling Forward," pristine pads and ethereal chimings coming on like Dragon's Eye doing Kompakt Pop Ambient, albeit with signature cracks and fissures showing through. "Row" makes good use of the lulling swell-relent dynamics of the e-bow and its glassine corridors of gauze, bringing to mind the late-period guitar-wrung tone-poems of Paul Bradley, lyrical drift skirting the fizzing periphery of digital noise-mongering. On "Movement Transposed" the dark end of the piano's innards - strummed and reverbed strings - is trailed across the soundstage in a fog of thrumming and trilling timbral motion. There are more challenging, even grim, explorations, such as "Nineteen Sixty Five," with its sharp metallic soundmasses in abraded heavings, or the final "Fragrant," in which the listener is placed in an odd suspension of scrapes and bows and strange resonances. But the most effective Son of Rose territory is in the inbetween, as on "Toward Sensation," which hovers ambiguously in an intermediate nonplace between edgy nerve-scrape and delightful frisson, gesturing toward harmonic consonance, then choosing nuanced dissonance; or "RADii," with its spray of fibrillating droplets over thin liquid drones in aqueous tintinnabulations, resolving into tides of low-end well-up and slow 'copter-blade pulses of Reichian keyboard clusters.

There are times when Son of Rose's silvery and slivery ambience hints at something of the lyrical sound-collage spirit of Gas. But mostly its alignment is toward the 12k - and/OAR - Sirr side of accessible experimental things, and a predilection for cold-warm communings of glimmering sine-tones. All in all, All In plays out a kind of Pop Microsound, one shaken loose from the stuffier end of lowercase minimalism, and choroegraphed in elegant tonal balletics through a veil of smears.

All In is out now on Blanket-Fields.

Blanket-Fields

Son Of Rose