Visible Cloaks - Paradessence Visible Cloaks

Paradessence, Visible Cloaks’ third full length, is a work of emergence and illusion. The album’s fourteen songs shift, heave, and shimmer against a faintly luminous backdrop of night, a cavernous space shaped by sparse hyperreal representations of the natural world. The arrangements are simultaneously grandiose and fragile, both an inversion and culmination of what came before and as adventurous as anything they’ve produced so far.
Since transforming from Cloaks to Visible Cloaks in 2014, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile have mapped a complex matrix of oppositional concepts: organic and artificial, chance and deliberate, authentic and replicated. The album title itself, drawn from author Alex Shakar’s satirical portmanteau of “paradoxical” and “essence,” reflects these tensions directly: the paradessence of consumer product is the “schismatic core” that gives rise to its desirability (in Shakar’s example, coffee is desired because it is both relaxing and stimulating simultaneously). The balancing act of Paradessence brings these strains into greater urgency as life in the 21st century is reordered by these same tensions.

Silence is an important character in Paradessence, felt not only in the sculpting of sound but in the pressure it exerts on everything and what emerges. The group took influence from architectural theorist Christopher Alexander’s concept of “positive space,” an idea that the same degree of care can be given to the shape of the void around an object as the construction of the object itself. We hear how sounds carry their own silence, oscillating in and out of existence, running through life cycles like a microorganism.

There is a collectivity to the instruments that underpin Paradessence. They move like a herd, as when wind drifts over a field of leaves and the air becomes visible in the absence of motion; multiple species cohabit the same song, protruding, receding, and transforming over the course of several minutes. “Instead of creating pieces that function horizontally as environments,” says Doran, “we wanted to conceptualize them as living material changing in space, continually in flux.” Song-forms steer away from ambience towards pure abstraction. Utopianism hovers at the edges; a relationship to imagined futures which is neither naïve, cynical, nor nostalgic.

The world Visible Cloaks have built over time is often rendered physical by collaborators, a familiar cast of whom return for Paradessence. Motion Graphics (Joe Williams) makes an appearance on “synthetic woodwinds” and also co-mixed the album, contouring its shapes with his signature sheen. Interlinked pieces “Shapes” and “Thinking” were developed with environmental music innovators Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano, who also worked with the duo on the intergenerational FRKWYS collaboration serenitatem. The latter piece features a spoken text written by Ojima, read in Japanese by Shibano and in French by composer and longtime friend Félicia Atkinson.

Componium Ensemble, Doran’s “indeterminate chamber music” project of self-playing software instruments, provides the infrastructure for “System” in a moment of Pessoa-ian heteronymity. The album also features Ioana Șelaru, a Romanian composer and violinist who lends her voice and string playing to “Intarsia.” Doran describes their collaboration as “an exercise in illusionary presence” which they jointly developed from “the idea of juxtaposing her real instrument playing with virtual instruments to blur the boundaries between synthetic string instruments and those existing in reality.”

Șelaru’s charged performance on “Intarsia” is a clear demonstration of the dramatic core of Paradessence: an urgent sculptural undertaking, an instrument and a human voice modulated by a sea of synthetic growth. Doran describes how for him “this slippage between the real and the virtual captures something else entirely, something strange and ineffable that is an inherent aspect of life in digital modernity, both online and in real life.” It is electronic music which not only conjures an abstract representation of our current dream reality through its shifting forms but builds imagined spaces which are emotionally nuanced and rise to moments of grace.