The more head scratching you do when first exposed to some albums, the better they turn out in the long run. That is definitely the case with the work of Visible Cloaks, a forward thinking duo who have just released their first full length album in nine years. They obviously come from other planets, I am not even going to attempt to question that, and their calling card has the word ‘experimental’ splashed across it in bold, large lettering. And yes, they have solar systems of ambience in their sonic kit bag, if you want to predict what music beamed in from outer space is going to sound like, I put my money on it being something like this. The forms and structures we associate with songs or indeed most pieces of music are nowhere to be found, these audio offerings are not bound by anything so restrictive as time signatures, beginnings, middles or closing passages. It is hard to define just what they are doing, the whole 14-track suite flies past our hearing senses in less than 45 minutes and you are surprised that amount of time has passed, in much the same way as we cannot see our planet spin, so too the music of Visible Cloaks comes and goes without any tangible hint of motion whatsoever.

But I come back to those words ‘experimental’ and ‘ambient,’ for the beauty in this record is less with these aspects, instead the beating heart is the multitude of moments that feel warm and familiar. I might even lean into the word nostalgic, for there are times here that the early days of electronica, when the plugged in vibrations were still audibly having their dials turned by human hands, are vividly recalled. And as the stars begin to explode into glorious meteor showers, so too the music suddenly enters the realms of the familiar. The track ‘Slippage’ for example, is about halfway through when the sound of something metallic rattling around an empty tin bucket falls away to reveal firstly, an ever-widening expanse of deep space but then secondly, some rousing melody played on electric keys with more than a sideways hint of the bagpipes to them. Later on, the track ‘Shapes’ introduces some delicate acoustic piano notes to the mix alongside distant horn sounds evoking memories of early twentieth century, northern industrial England. Quite unexpected for sure, but still one of the many elements that hold your attention as our journey into the stars becomes ever more probable by the day.

The path to ‘Paradessence’ traces back through a decade of sonic world‑making by Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile, whose work as Visible Cloaks has always hovered at the intersection of digital craft and imagined ecologies. From the prismatic surfaces of ‘Reassemblage’ to the luminous collaboration with Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano (who also appear here), the duo has treated electronic composition as a form of speculative architecture. Doran’s curatorial and soundtrack projects expanded that vision outward, revealing a deepening interest in how music can hold memory, landscape, and futurity at once. On ‘Paradessence,’ those threads converge into pieces that seem to breathe and reorganise themselves, as if the album were modelling its own evolving habitat. This sensation hits a pitch by the time we reach ‘Intarsia’ (featuring Ioana Selaru), wherein the scraping violin textures and sudden bursts of simultaneously familiar and alien voice sounds all merge to suggest that something is banging on the walls of another dimension. And maybe that is exactly what happened? Closing track ‘System’ may have the soothing presence of familiar sounding keys and wind instruments, but it also suggests that we need to explore new ways of playing them from this point on. I could not find any dictionary definition of the word ‘paradessence’ but just like the music this album contains, it still somehow makes sense. So, just as unfamiliarity must not be mistaken for confliction, so too must we have faith in the evidence placed in front of us today, that the Visible Cloaks are opening us up to a quite wonderous place.

Danny Neill

You can buy a physical copy of the album via this link: https://amzn.to/49puZ25