VISIBLE CLOAKS

In the nine years that have passed since experimental electronic duo Visible Cloaks released their last full-length album – 2017’s groundbreaking Reassemblage – much has changed. Released at the beginning of the first Trump administration, that album’s disarmingly clean timbres, inspired by ambient synth pioneers like Hiroshi Yoshimura and Yellow Magic Orchestra, now read as a natural climax of the 2010s electronic music moment: its restless exploration of globality and posthumanism. Today, the realities of Covid, the global ascent of the far-right and the Strait of Hormuz crisis have shattered the dream of “fourth world music”, the post-national, utopian sound world imagined by Jon Hassell and Brian Eno nearly half a century ago.

This year, the duo returns with Paradessence, a darker, duskier album than Reassemblage. If the latter conjured images of enormous data servers, plastic plants and lovestruck robots, the scraping string textures of Paradessence introduce a welcome element of friction, finding a beating, broken heart beneath the duo's synth wizardry. TANK spoke to Visible Cloaks’ Spencer Doran on the album’s curious title, his experience composing for video games and what world music means today. Read the interview and listen to their mix below. 

Matteo Pini It’s been nine years since Reassemblage. Why the wait? What were you meditating on in between albums?
Visible Cloaks We had some other projects in between albums, but it isn’t very sustainable to be a full-time recording artist here in the US, so you find yourself doing other things too. We’re very slow on developing albums, and I had gotten to a fairly existential place about my relationship with the medium. I suppose it gave me space to think about the internal mechanics of arrangement and what we truly want to accomplish with our process. We did a teaching residency in 2023 (through Camp, a residency programme in the Pyrenees) that forced me to snap my ideas into clearer focus.

MP How did composing the soundtrack to SEASON: A letter to the future impact how you approached the making of this album?
VC In addition to being the composer for SEASON I also oversaw the entire audio direction, which had a pretty profound effect on how I think about listening. In video game audio software like Wwise (which we used for the project), there are tools for creating audio systems that are much more nuanced and deeply designed than what you find in most music DAWs, which is very inspiring. It also got me interested in atypical recording processes – ultrasound, the spherical harmonics of ambisonics, etc. – which appear on the record.

MP The album title Paradessence is your own coinage. How did you arrive at it and how does it reflect the themes you were exploring sonically?
VC It was actually coined by the author Alex Shaker so I can’t take credit for it, but the idea is something like this: a thing that is desirable can simultaneously hold two conflicting attributes, and the conflict between these attributes is in fact what makes it desirable. I think a lot about our own music in these terms, of being built by different shapes of unresolved tensions: abstract and defined, serene and erratic, emotional and cerebral. These tensions don’t resolve into a synthesis, but instead, their tension defines what we do.

MP Do you abide by Brian Eno’s conception of ambient music as needing to be “as ignorable as it is interesting”?
VC Yes, but most people don’t seem to get around to the second part. I’m not so sure we make ambient music, but I still think that adage is useful. You could even say it has a certain paradessence to it.

MP Your music has a tranquility to it that can border on the uncanny or post-human. What emotional resonances are you looking to explore?
VC Those that don’t have good representations yet. Changes in technology and cultural conditions tend to afford space for new emotional states, and art is what has always been at the forefront of mapping them or articulating what they even are. I’m not sure if making computer music is still a useful method for this, but at one point it was.

MP There is an optimism inherent in the term “world music”, one that seems almost quaint in our hyperfragmented present. How do you conceptualise the global in your work? Do you see yourself participating in that lineage? 
VC Yes, although Reassembalge probably dealt a bit more with that idea than the new record. World music was a paradigmatic cultural product of the globalization era, capital flows promising a future in which cultural barriers were eviscerated and a new unifying form of cultural communication could be born…but in reality, this looked more like Putumayo CDs at Whole Foods. Through commodification, all the edges and differences get rounded off into a more sanitized, generic form – I think also of things like the white Monobloc chair or the bland uniformity of the “third wave” coffee shop, experiences that become untethered from any idea of a specific civilization. Byung-Chul Han has a useful term for this – “hyperculture” – but right before his book on the topic was finally published in English, the Ukraine war broke out and made the whole thing irrelevant, as the push toward multipolarity violently disrupts this concept.

MP Tell me about the collaborations on Paradessence
VC Joe Williams, who records as Motion Graphics, helped mix the record and contributed to “Disque”. My first time working with someone else to mix a Visible Cloaks project, I trust Joe’s ears and was driving myself crazy with micro-changes, so it was great to have him in the mix. “Shapes” was a piece that we had developed on tour with Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano, back when we were touring the serenitatem project we did together. Yoshio wrote a text for it, which spun off into a new piece with Félicia Atkinson, who is an old friend, reading her French translation. Ioana Șelaru was someone who reached out to me out of the blue, via our mutual friend Oliver Coates, and we started sending unreleased music back and forth, leading to us developing “Intarsia” together. One of her unreleased pieces is featured in this mix.

Paradessence is out now.