Tag Archives: Visible Cloaks

Fresh Juice

Fresh Juice 8th June 2026

Bedouine – Long Way To Fall

‘Long Way To Fall,’ is one of the standout moments on Bedouine’s new album ‘Neon Summer Skin.’ It arrives as the record’s first true exhale, a gorgeously gliding, quietly devastating song that gathers all the album’s themes of memory, yearning, and emotional inheritance into one graceful sweep. Initially the record has a sense of someone moving through the half‑lit corridors of childhood, before ‘Long Way To Fall’ steps forward with this blue-sky melancholy: piano flourishes that seem to hover in mid‑air, guitar lines bending with George Harrison‑like tenderness, and a vocal performance that feels both weightless and full of ache. Bedouine’s reflections on family, distance, and the slow realisation that childhood does not end cleanly crystallise into something approaching the devotional. You can buy the album via this link: https://amzn.to/434ckFA

The Giant Robots – Spooky Signs

This is the new single from long‑running Lausanne garage‑rock outfit The Giant Robots, arrives as a limited‑edition 7″ on Rogue Records, released in May and pressed in an edition of 500 copies on black vinyl. Backed with the B‑side ‘Goodbye,’ it continues the fardisa organ drenched, fuzz guitar assault on the classic garage band that they have been plugging into since the mid-1990s. In the Fruit Tree Records universe it is also an out-and-out pop banger, but then we live in a place where distortion is welcomed when delivered with this kind of intensity and being slightly out of time with the masses is positively celebrated too. Just follow the link: https://roguerecords.bandcamp.com/album/spooky-signs

Mama’s Broke – The Nameless

This is the lead single from Mama’s Broke’s forthcoming album ‘Reunion,’ which is going to be released on Free Dirt Records and Forward Music Group with an accompanying 16mm video filmed in Halifax by Nicole Cecile Holland. The track also appears as an advance digital single on Bandcamp ahead of the album’s 21st August release, continues the Nova Scotian duo’s tradition of stark, unflinching folk storytelling. They have been on my radar for a number of years now and with new work like this arriving, it stands as a positive affirmation that all their early promise really is growing into something with depth, nuance and above all, a natural musicality. Check them out this way: https://mamasbroke.bandcamp.com/album/reunion

Konyikeh – Jealous

This superb track released on FAMM as part of Konyikeh’s EP ‘Cinere,’ stands out as one of the project’s most tightly wound emotional snapshots. Issued alongside this official video, the track arrives in the same burst of creative renewal that shapes the EP’s broader palette, a blend of R&B and soul inflections with the sharper rhythmic edges Konyikeh has been exploring in recent years. On ‘Jealous,’ she channels that mix into something lean but also intense, her voice cutting through the arrangement with a clarity that mirrors the EP’s theme of rebuilding from the ground up. It is a compact but potent piece of songwriting that signals how confidently she is moving into this new phase of her work. You can find the EP to download here: https://amzn.to/3Qb0ztW

Joel Ross – Trinity (Father, Son And Holy Spirit)

Originally featured on Joel Ross’s album ‘Gospel Music,’ released on Blue Note Records earlier this year, it is a 17‑track project that marks the vibraphonist’s fifth release for the label and features his expanded Good Vibes ensemble. The album frames Ross’s writing within a spiritual and narrative arc, drawing on the musical language he absorbed in church and filtering it through his increasingly intricate, conversational jazz vocabulary. Within that context, ‘Trinity’ functions as one of the record’s central pillars: a piece built around interlocking lines and shifting harmonic light, shaped by the sextet’s responsiveness and Ross’s instinct for letting melody and rhythm bloom together. Heard inside the album’s broader exploration of faith, community, and musical inheritance, the track becomes a kind of structural hinge, setting the emotional and thematic tone for everything that follows. You can get the album via this link: https://amzn.to/4o05uug

Visible Cloaks (feat. Ioana Șelaru) – Intarsia

This is one of the most arresting moments on Visible Cloaks’ long‑awaited return ‘Paradessence,’ it distils everything strange, inviting, and quietly disorienting about the duo’s world‑building into a single, shape‑shifting piece. After an album that drifts like a weightless suite of experimental ambience, dissolving familiar song structures, bending time, and slipping between warmth and alienness, ‘Intarsia’ plays like the point where their decade of digital craft and imagined ecologies reaches a kind of fevered clarity. Scraping violin textures, uncanny vocal bursts, and the sense of something pressing against the edges of the mix make it feel as though another dimension is trying to break through, echoing the album’s broader fascination with memory, futurity, and sonic habitats that reorganise themselves as you listen. It is a track that captures the duo at their most transportive, reminding you why their music rewards the kind of deep, curious listening that reveals new contours each time. You can buy the album via this link: https://amzn.to/4uLaF3O

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New Release Reviews

Visible Cloaks – Paradessence

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

Visible Cloaks by Jonathan Sielaff
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