Paradessence

Description

Visible Cloaks’ third album, Paradessence, is a work of emergence and illusion. Its fourteen tracks unfold across a dimly lit nocturnal backdrop, a cavernous space shaped by hyperrealistic and sparse representations of the natural world. The arrangements, at once grand and fragile, constitute an inversion and culmination of their previous works, and are as audacious as anything they have produced to date. Since their transformation from Cloaks to Visible Cloaks in 2014, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile have mapped a complex matrix of opposing concepts: organic and artificial, accidental and intentional, authentic and reproduced. The album title itself, drawn from Alex Shakar’s satirical portmanteau of “paradoxical” and “essence,” directly reflects these tensions: the paradessence of the consumer product is the “schismatic core” that gives it its appeal (in Shakar’s example, coffee is desired because it is both relaxing and stimulating). The subtle balance of Paradessence gives these tensions an increased urgency, as life in the 21st century is itself overturned by these same tensions. Silence is an essential character in Paradessence; it is felt not only in the sound sculpting, but also in the pressure it exerts on everything and on what emerges from it. We perceive how sounds carry their own silence within them, oscillating between existence and disappearance, passing through life cycles in the manner of a microorganism. The instruments that underpin Paradessence possess a collective dimension. They move as a herd, as when the wind blows across a field of leaves and the air becomes visible in the stillness; several species coexist in the same song, emerging, fading, and transforming over a few minutes. A utopianism hovers in the background; a relationship to imagined futures that is neither naive, cynical, nor nostalgic. The universe that Visible Cloaks has built over time often takes shape through collaborators, some of whom return for Paradessence. Motion Graphics (Joe Williams) contributes on “synthetic woodwinds” and also co-mixed the album, sculpting its forms with his signature sound. The tracks “Shapes” and “Thinking” were developed with environmental music pioneers Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano, who had previously collaborated with the duo on the intergenerational FRKWYS project, serenitatem. The Componium Ensemble, Doran's "indeterminate chamber music" project, consisting of self-playing software instruments, provides the infrastructure for "System." The album also features Ioana Șelaru, a Romanian composer and violinist, who lends her voice and string playing to "Intarsia." Paradessence is electronic music that, through its shifting forms, does more than merely evoke an abstract representation of our current dreamlike reality.