“Steel” is the fourth and final single from Visible Cloaks’ Paradessence. While it is one of the album’s few pieces to use arpeggios or “grid time,” no five seconds of the song are identical. Inspired in part by Iannis Xenakis’s concept of “stochastic timbre”, new sounds and textures are constantly, seamlessly introduced and transformed, their parameters modulated asynchronously. It begins with percussive dots moving in an ascending figure; metal taught to sing. The edges fill in with frayed lines and small pools which rise and drain; airy synths pull inward like a landscape breathing. What we took to be the floor reveals an undulating quality, a slow wave moving through the carpet we stand on. Decay eventually overtakes even the most artificial sounds: bolts and steel melt and shed their skins. While the second half of the piece was recorded live as a Wi-FI studio jam (“We were having trouble patching into the AD/DA system that day so Ryan’s parts were recorded over Airplay streaming,” explains Doran), what results is an interlocking set of systems growing and writhing across time.