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.
