Written by In the nine years since Portland ambient duo Visible Cloaks released Reassemblage, the worlds that record occupied, both real and imagined, came to an end. When the album came out, at the start of the first Trump presidency, there was a chill in the air, a grim understanding that something wicked was coming, its shape to be determined. The anticipated techno-utopia promised in the ’90s, the globally connected network of trade and culture that obliterated borders, quickly soured, and a handful of coding-school barons descended to “disrupt” everything we’d done to make life bearable. So much electronic music in the late aughts and 2010s predicted the coming hangover, especially vaporwave, which turned ’80s synth-pop samples and ’90s digital-keyboard sounds into uncanny critiques of capitalism’s effect on memory. Reassemblage sits on the periphery of vaporwave, populated with cool-to-the-touch synths, but it’s also partially inspired by Japanese environmental music, which is more about tapping into the moment than steeping in weird nostalgia. (Spencer Doran, half of the duo alongside Ryan Carlile, curated the Grammy-nominated compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990.) Woven through Visible Cloaks’ beautiful, featherlight album was a hope for serenity, a desire for peace that never came to pass.
Now, after a global pandemic, a genocide beamed into every pocket on the globe, and the introduction of “enshittification” to the lexicon, Visible Cloaks are back with Paradessence. It’s a fitting follow-up, expanding on the Reassemblage formula while accounting for techniques learned from working on 2017’s electro-acoustic mini-album Lex and serenitatem, a 2019 collaboration with Japanese ambient auteurs Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano. This time, the duo is even more interested in the otherworldly interplay between the virtual and the organic, rendering stringed instruments and the human voice with the glassy sheen of digital synthesis. It’s not a darker album than Reassemblage, per se, but it’s certainly a more unsettled one, as jittery noise and scraps of melodies build into tightly-packed clusters, only to disintegrate just as quickly. Paradessence doesn’t so much envision a new world as react to our current one, a harrowing reality where people are starting to realize how much of their minds they’ve outsourced to addicting technology.
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Unlike Reassemblage, whose compositions felt like discrete but well-paced chapters of a particular story, Paradessence hangs together as one long piece. It’s the kind of record that benefits from listening in one sitting, as it unfolds continuously, gathering upon itself like a blooming peony. Passages may feel incongruous at times, generating themselves from unknown electrical triggers, but the stretches of silence Doran and Carlile weave throughout act as a kind of connective tissue. As the album goes on, it’s as though we’re slowly zooming out, watching constellations of synapses firing in different portions of a brain. These silences can be jarring, snapping you out of yourself and back into the present. In an interview with Willamette Week, Doran likened Visible Cloaks’ approach to Brian Eno’s concept of ambient music being both ignorable and interesting, holding one’s attention by not holding it at all. We get used to a certain amount of perpetual noise, dissociating to the ever-present hum of a city or the glazed-over social media scroll, but once that noise cuts out, we’re able to take stock of where we are, adjust our posture, rub our eyes, and reset.
So instead of a series of songs that arc and resolve in miniature, Paradessence is composed of moments. There’s plenty of gorgeous sound design to get lost in, like rubberbanding delays in “Skylight” that give the effect of factory machinery imploding, or the timbres that open “Telescoping,” which mirror a Mellotron, a flute, and a choir all happening at once. But let your mind wander, and Carlile and Doran’s digital wrangling blurs into a colorful, reverberant hum. It’s the small moments that make you snap to, that re-focus your attention to the complexity of the arrangements. At the beginning of “Disque,” keyboards are layered out of sync with one another, creating the effect of falling up the stairs. About a minute in, after the song has settled into a period of soft stillness, a falling line of glowing triangle-wave notes seems to appear out of nowhere. It happens again a minute later, serving as colorful trail blazes on a craggy hike.
On “Slippage,” which returns to the same key as opener “Apsis,” metallic textures spiderweb across its bed of humming tones, ramping up tension until it all breaks apart and gives way to a droning string section. That drone morphs into a sea shanty–like melody, as if the clouds have parted and the waters calmed, giving you a stable place to stand after having to constantly adjust your footing. Each track seems to build toward these bright, attention-grabbing instances, and it’s interesting to wonder if Carlile and Doran reverse-engineered their songwriting process, finding a sound or tune that made their eyes light up and figuring out how to break it apart. You may not remember the entirety of the walk you took on a given day, but you’ll remember seeing how the evening light glinted off rooftops, or the friendly cat that stretched and crossed your path.
Toward the album’s end, “Steel” is about as close as the duo gets to conventional structure, as a shimmering zither pivots around a springing handpan drum. For nearly two minutes, Carlile and Doran add layer after layer, building tension until the loop becomes too top-heavy and finally buckles under the pressure. Spurts of noise zip around the stereo field, and digital wind-instrument flourishes weave through a gauzy drone. Perhaps there is a collapse coming, the duo seems to say, as the ability of our systems to sustain themselves gets shakier. But afterward, amid the rubble, there’s hope for beauty. It’s simpler than what came before it, but there’s potential. After all, the end is never really the end.
