Visible Cloaks announce first new album in nine years

Visible Cloaks – Paradessence – Promo Pic – 001 [Jonathan Sielaff]

Music

Visible Cloaks, the experimental duo of Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile, have announced their first new full-length album in nine years titled ‘Paradessence’.

The album follows acclaimed turns, including their 2017 LP ‘Reassemblage’, and their 2019 colloborative LP ‘serenitatem’ with Japanese ambient pioneers Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano.

Beyond these releases the duo have stayed busy and curious, with Doran compiling the Grammy-nominated 2019 compilation ‘Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990’, something of a holy grail for Japanese music connoisseurs. More recently, Doran composed the soundtrack for the meditative video game ‘SEASON: A letter to the future’.

Their new album is inspired by “sparse hyperreal representations of the natural world” and features the likes of French composer Félicia Atkinson, Romanian composer / violinist Ioana Selaru, as well as the duo’s previous collaborators Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano.

Doran describes the music of ‘Paradessence’ as an attempt to capture organic, shifting forms: “Instead of creating pieces that function horizontally as environments, we wanted to conceptualize them as living material changing in space, continually in flux”. He also references the concept of “slippage between the real and the virtual [that] captures something else entirely, something strange and ineffable that is an inherent aspect of life in digital modernity, both online and in real life”. The album’s title was inspired by author Alex Shakar’s portmanteau of the words ‘paradoxical’ and ‘essence’ to explore the idea of satisfying multiple contradictory desires.

The duo have shared a video for the album’s lead single ‘Disque’. The track features the artist Motion Graphics on “synthetic woodwinds”, and the video was made with UK-based photogrammetrist Grade Eterna, who used 3D scanning tools to generate a virtual model of a London greenhouse. It’s a cerebral, futuristic, and beautifully serene vision; music for daydreamers.

‘Paradessence’ is out May 22nd via RVNG Intl. Check the video for ‘Disque‘, the artwork and the tracklist below.

More info / listen HERE.

Tracklist
1. Apsis
2. Skylight
3. Disque (feat. Motion Graphics)
4. Balloon
5. Slippage
6. Telescoping
7. Shapes (feat. Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano)
8. Thinking (feat. Félicia Atkinson, Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano)
9. Zinna
10. Swirl
11. Steel
12. Intarsia (feat. Ioana Șelaru)
13. Capgras
14. System (feat. Componium Ensemble)